Google Editions eBookstore has at long last arrived and is mostly receiving applause.

And indeed, the new sales platform is revolutionary, and many of the most anticipated components of Google’s eBookstore are in place, even if halfway realized in some cases. And none of these components are as anticipated as Google’s supposed inclusion of independent bookstores in their new venture. One way or another, it looks like Google is  making good on that promise.

All that is well and good, I suppose, but the core issues with Google’s massive books project remain. That is, its cataloguing and scanning practices leave not only much to be desired — they leave much to be fixed.

As MobyLives has reported before, the metadata and organization of Google’s so-called “Last Library” project (from which are drawn many of the public domain titles to be downloaded for free in their new bookstore) is somewhat chaotic. A Mae West biography filed under religion. Henry James was at one point listed as the author of Madame Bovary. Books about Jimi Hendrix filed under Victorian themes. These errors are the substance of academia’s darkest nightmares. Centuries of work scrambled in mere months.

Hyperbole? Not from where I’m reading. Yesterday I downloaded the Android app for Google’s eBookstore and did what any self-respecting cynic would do — I went directly to the free editions of the Charles Dickens classics Oprah Winfrey just chose for her book club. In fact, Google gave me Great Expectations automatically with the app. It’s a nice edition replete with the celebrated illustrations of Cruikshank, Wood, Steel, et al. Not to mention a successful OCR (optical character recognition) update to the scanned source material.

A Tale Of Two Cities on the other hand, required me to wade out a little further into Google’s bookstore, where it got murky fast.

It began innocently enough. The search was painless and nothing was critically wrong with the data for the book. So I downloaded the first listing and fired it up.

It didn’t take long to realize that this was a scan of a 19th century book that has not gone through the OCR spit-shine. Also immediately apparent was the disconcerting fact that this was only Volume II of a two-volume edition. Yes — a two-volume electronic book. But isn’t that inherently a waste of the electronic platform? It didn’t help matters any that Volume I was missing.

As I began to search the book more thoroughly I found the common flaws (or charms) of a very old book. In this case it was an ex-library copy with the card at the back showing all the dates on which it had been checked out. As you can see from the image I captured (on the left), this book had a long but somewhat limited run in the Harvard University library. Donated by Ernest Lewis Gay, who graduated with the class of 1897. All this was gleaned from the bookplate at the front of the book.

Bookplates can be charming. It’s true. But the inclusion of poorly scanned half-titles and frontispiece illustrations (sometimes needlessly doubled — including blank pages at the front) is not. All of this is moot, in my opinion, when confronted with the notion of a two-volume electronic edition of a Dickens novel. Let alone a broken set.

But these are the kind of issues being lost amidst the excitement of Google’s new venture.

On the other hand, I love the open nature of the sales platform, both from a retail and technological perspective. Nearly everything but the Kindle works with Google’s eBookstore and I’m fine with that. As a former bookseller I am also excited to see whether independent bookstores can have success selling electronic titles. I know they can use all the help they can get.

But what is very troubling, and this has always been the case with projects like these, is the slapdash approach to the books. Fast and cheap has definitely led to some clumsy ebook practices, as evidenced by the bizarre edition I found of A Tale Of Two Cities.

Such errors are common throughout the ebook world. Even print-on-demand companies like Kessinger have a legion of imperfections in their scanned books. Underlining. Highlighting. The notes of previous readers in the margins. In the case of their obscure catalog you are paying a premium. One thing that should be noted is that Google is fairly good at repairing and updating their services. I have no doubt that they will one day have these problems fixed. I just think that “one day” might have come sooner if they had started out with a little more patience.

One last nit to pick: When I went back to the Google eBookstore to download a different, hopefully complete edition of A Tale Of Two Cities the next most prominently listed edition was titled: A tale of two cities: Hard times for these times. For some inexplicable reason Google subtitled one Dickens novel with the title of another. Fascinating. Though not exactly the most exciting idea for a mash-up.

As the man said, there are the best of times, and these are the worst of times for the ebook.