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Update: Fixamatron 0001
We've released a small update to Voluminous this evening. It fixes a few little issues that people have got in touch with us about:
- A small bug when showing/hiding the Topic Browser has been fixed.
- The Topic Browser is also now resizable, so you can choose to fit more topics into your window, or more books, as you wish.
- We've also implemented our first batch of Fixamatron updates.
Fixamawha?
The Fixamatron is what we here at Wooji Juice call our book quality-control system.
Voluminous' job is tricky sometimes: It has to read a file of plain computer text and somehow figure out what goes where. There's a certain amount of, well, old-fashioned guessing involved: Which bits are actual "book", and which are technical details and administrivia tacked on at the beginning? Which language and character set is it written in? It's made even more difficult because sometimes, the people who publish the books make mistakes, and save them in the wrong format.
We do a pretty good job of second-guessing these sorts of mistakes and fixing them automatically, so you don't have to worry about it. We run every single book in the catalogue through a battery of tests to make sure they all work. These tests have saved our bacon on numerous occasions and mean a better, more reliable Voluminous for you to use.
However, some things slip through the tests — because computers aren't very smart, and if it walks like a book and quacks like a book1, the computer assumes it is a book — even if, to a human, it seems to be lacking some pages, or the accented letters aren't quite right. And it's particularly difficult for us to double-check in languages we don't read ourselves. This is fortunately pretty rare, but it does crop up occasionally.
All Is Not Lost
So, Voluminous has a feature called "Report Book Problem". If you come across a book that slipped through our net, you can just click Report Book Problem and it gets entered into the Fixamatron, which we go through regularly, fixing the problems we find.
Today, we fixed a whole bunch of books. Picking out a few, in no particular order:
- A collection of Japanese language titles, including Rashomon by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
- A collection of Chinese titles, including 中庸 章句 by Zhu Xi.
- Works by Tolstoy, Hugo Grotius, and William Sterns Davis, in no particular order.
So, thank-you to the Voluminous users who brought these to our attention, and we hope they, and everyone else, are enjoying reading.