Recently I was informed that an old book I used for research whilst writing Monu-Mental About Prehistoric Antrim was available now as a print on demand book, so I ordered a copy.

It turned up yesterday and I was gobsmacked at how bad it is. What I think they've done is simply take the text version from Google books and print it. As we all know, the OCR in google books is pretty poor and there is very little proof reading (if any). Also, where there are images in the scan there is just gobbledegook in the text.

Every page you open the book at has many glaring errors! Several words merged; missing words; duplicated words; words that just don't exist ... you name it, it's got it!

There's a huge danger here that books like this will cause new and incorrect versions of quotes to be used, and that these versions shall become the norm over time.

My advice? Only buy a Print on Demand reprint if it states that it's a full facsimile of the original.