I’m rewatching the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice mini-series, and that also triggered a re-read of the book. There is some competition in the house about the TV, but none about the Kindle, so while I’ve only seen the first two episodes, I’ve spent the day binge-reading the book and have almost finished it. As a side effect, I have no photo from today.

Consuming both in parallel highlighted the TV series’ accuracy. They complement each other nicely. The TV series, inevitably, has to take some shortcuts and leave some gaps, which my reading of the book fills in. Also, I’m not good with faces, and the characters are often introduced so briefly or indirectly that, without the book’s support, I wouldn’t really know who they are.

When I first watched the series in , for example, I remember being puzzled by the girl who accompanies Lizzy on her visit to Hunsford. Yes, yes, if I had been paying perfect attention to all the faces then I would have remembered that I first saw that girl together with the Lucases, and that Charlotte asked Lizzy to join her (Charlotte’s) father and sister to Hunsford.

The TV series, on the other hand, brings the characters to life. Austen is very parsimonious with her descriptions. Which gives her works a timelessness they wouldn’t otherwise have, but I personally do want to know what the people in the story look like – not just that they have fine eyes and a noble mien, but to know the colour of their hair, the kind of dress they wear.

Afterwards I tried to buy Sense and Sensibility. The Kindle store was absolutely flooded with fake copies where certain words had been replaced with random near-synonyms. The books were probably generated by some thesaurus-based process that is supposed to modify the text just enough to ensure that Amazon’s own algorithms will not flag it as an exact copy of an already-registered work. Some even had stolen covers – there was one purporting to be from the Wordsworth Classics series. I bought one of these fakes by accident, but already the first page had such gratingly clumsy word substitutions that its fakeness became obvious, and some phrases were completely nonsensical.

“For many generations” becomes “for plenty generations” in one copy, and “for lots generations” (sic) in another. “The legal inheritor” becomes “the criminal inheritor” and “the felony inheritor”. One describes John Dashwood as a “young guy”.

With the next few books, I downloaded a sample before buying, so I wouldn’t get scammed again. Finally after several frustrations I realized that the upload date was a giveaway. All the fakes had been uploaded within the last few days. This sped up the winnowing process significantly and allowed me to find an actual, real, ungarbled copy.