Book Deals and Reviews

416 of 451 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of five stars A Masterpiece of Wit and Style, A Timeless Work for the Ages, June 11, 2002
By Gary F. Taylor “GFT” (Biloxi, MS USA) See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME) This review is from: Pride and Prejudice (Bantam Classics) (Mass Market Paperback) Jane Austen is one of the great masters of the English language, and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is her great masterpiece, a sharp and witty comedy of manners played out in early 19th Century English society, a world in which men held virtually all the power and women were obliged to negotiate mine fields of social position, respectability, money, love, and sex to marry both to their own liking and to the benefit of their family. And such is especially the case of the Bennetts, a family of daughters whose father’s estate is entailed to a remote relative, for upon Mr. Bennett’s death they’ll lose home, land, earning, everything. But are the Bennett daughters up to playing a winning hand in this high stakes matrimonial game without forfeiting their own personal integrity?

This fight of the sexes is mainly seen through the eyes of second daughter Elizabeth, who possesses a razor sharp wit and rich sense of humor and who finds herself hindered by her own addlepated mother, her sister Jane’s hopeless love for the wealthy Mr. Bingley, and her sister Lydia’s penchant for humiliation. Not to talk about the high born, formidable, and outrageously proud Mr. Darcy, who looks determined to trump her every card. But the game of love proves more surprising than either Elizabeth or Mr. Darcy can imagine, and on occasion a apparently weak hand proves a winning one when all cards are on the table.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is simply one of the funniest novels ever written, peopled with memorable characters brought vividly to life as they both succeed and fail at the game of life as indicated by the manners of their era. It’s a novel to which I return again and again, enjoying Austen’s brillant skill. I have little respect for people who describe it as dull, slow, out of date, for as long as men and women live and fall in love it’ll never be out of style, generally be meaningful, and generally be humorous. A masterpiece of wit and style; a timeless novel for the ages.

---

158 of 174 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of five stars Check the Publisher carefully before you place your order because.., July 8, 2010
By Kiwi (Mississauga, Ontario Canada) See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER) This review is from: Pride and Prejudice (Paperback) One of the variants listed is published by “General Books LLC.” Another reader complained about the tiny and nearly unreadable font you most likely bought the variant published by General Books LLC and here is the reason.

General Books LLC is an imprint of VDM Publishing, (google them and look at the Wikipedia article on them) and they specialise in publishing books that are free of without doing any editing or quality control. Some quotes from the publishers web site will explain more:

“We produced your book using OCR software that will include an automated spell check. Our OCR software is 99 correct if the book is in good condition. But, with up to 3,500 characters per page, one may be an annoying number of typos..

After we re typeset and intended your book, the page numbers change so the old index and table of contents not work. So, we typically remove them. Since many of our books only sell a couple of copies, manually creating a new index and table of contents could add more than a hundred dollars to the cover price..

Our OCR software can not distinguish between an example and a smudge or library stamp so it ignores everything except type. We could really like to manually scan and add the illustrations. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies..

We produced your book using a robot who turned and photographed each page. Our robot is 99 correct. But on occasion two pages stick together. And on occasion a page may be missing from our copy of the book. We could really like to manually scan each page and purchase many copies of each original. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies… ”

So what you are to get if you purchase the variant published by General Books LLC is a scanned in, unedited, low quality (and with an nearly unreadable font from the sounds of it) unindexed / No table of contents book at a higher price than many of the good quality imprints available. Just, VDM Publishing is flooding with the low quality prints (450,000 of them are listed now) and, unfortunately, many of them have the reviews related with better quality imprints related with them. The product description is inadequate for the customer that is not aware of this publisher.

Totally unethical marketing.

A reader,Scott Hannigan commented: “What you have given us is feedback not a review. There’s an proper forum for your complaints. You may want to delete it as it brings down the average score of a classic.” In answer, I have to say that doesn’t supply a forum for complaints and was remarkably tolerant to taking on board criticism from many customers over the books published by General Books LLC. Also, is the Printer of these POD books and makes a considerable cut from them. Sadly, given that the General Books LLC variant is lumped in with other imprints from real publishers, there’s no real way of making possible purchasers aware of the problems with this specific variant of the book without inflicting it on the other variants available. C’est la vie.

Scott apologies for replying like this but removed my capability to comment many time ago I broke ze commenting terms. Re ” does supply a feedback section. You’ll find it under ‘My Account’, ‘Personalization’, ‘Leave Seller Feedback’” yes, they do indeed but the answer to myself and many others was uniformly that it is not their problem. Look up the discussion forum on Alphascript Books for a enlightening backgrounder on this one. That said, if you bought a book from General Books LLC and saw what it was like, you’d be greatly annoyed as most purchasers have been and if you returned it to for a refund, you’d be out of pocket for the postage.

---

119 of 130 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of five stars Excellent book, Kindle variant poor, August 4, 2010
By Lisa (Hawai’i) See all my reviews () This review is from: Pride and Prejudice (Kindle Edition) It goes without saying Pride and Prejudice is a classic of all time. My concern here and the reason for the low ranking is the poor quality of this Kindle variant. There are typos and in some number of places in the text , simple errors are made: in some places, the same word repeats itself along the lines of “the the bench,” a couple malapropisms I’m positive weren’t in the original text, and other typesetter’s error that, if this Kindle edition had been subject to a cursory review by a proofreader, could have been caught. I too could like to talk about the FACT that emphasized WORDS are all CAPITALIZED in this variant as surprisingly annoying. I have never seen an real book loaded with so many simple errors as this ebook is.

---