The Terrible Price of Free: On E-reading Jane Austen via Google's Ebooks - The Scholarly Kitchen

"Rather than pay for the Penguin or any other edited version of Austen, I decided to be a cheapskate and searched for free Google versions.  And that’s when things began to go wrong.  The Google editions were packed with errors. If I were not studying Google Ebooks for professional reasons, if I were not already familiar with the works of Austen, would I have gone on? Would I have thought that Austen does not know how to place quotation marks, that she made grammatical mistakes that would embarrass even a high school freshman, or that her dialogue sometimes breaks off without explanation? ...

Google has done a disservice to these works and their readers.  Free is a terrible price, as many readers will flock to these free editions — not knowing that other things are not equal — bypassing the edited volumes prepared by scrupulous publishers...."