Rindis.com

I picked up this book for free in the Kindle edition some time ago. Published in 1902, it is long out of copyright, and offered by Lecturable, who seems to specialize in Kindle editions of older historical works.

It is one of the first overview histories of ancient Mesopotamia written after archaeology efforts started in the region in the 19th century. This makes the scholarship well out of date, but accounting for that problem, it is a well done, and readable introduction to the subject, and certainly well worth the $2 it normally costs if you want to get at the root of scholarship on the subject.

Or, it would be if the text was in better shape. It is, of course, an OCR scan of the book, but it seems to have gotten minimal, if any, editing. Words breaking with a space in the middle (artifact of a word broken between lines, with a space inserted in place of the hyphen?) are an endemic problem, and garbled words (caused by the OCR picking the wrong letter) are not uncommon. In fact, I’d say the book as a whole averaged better than one error per page, except for one section 75% of the way through which was much worse. Any sort of minimal editing with a human pair of eyes would have found the bulk of the problems I saw.

I can’t really complain for free, and the vast majority of the errors were such that the book was quite readable (there was only one case where I was truly uncertain what a word was supposed to be). But, it has made me quite leery of Lecturable’s products, if this is going to be the usual quality.