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I have seen various e-books on the Internet that have a (v5.0) in the name e.g. 

Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species (v5.0).epub

Initially I thought this had to with the version 5 of the DocBook, but I have seen other versions (v3.4) that do not have a corresponding DocBook version. I have also seen this for e-books in .html and .txt files. Nothing in the those or the .epub file points at DocBook in any way.

What does this (v5.0) stand for?

Anthon
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Laina
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1 Answers1

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This is an indication of the quality of the ebook. (v5.0) should be close to retail quality:

v1.x: publication has been scanned and OCR-ed, but not spell checked.
v2.x: publication has been scanned, OCR-ed, and spell checked but not proofread.
v3.x: publication has been scanned, OCR-ed, spell checked, and proofread.
V4.x: publication has been proofread by multiple persons and is near retail quality.
v5.x: publication is of retail quality.

Minor version numbers are normally used for committed/uploaded changes.

I have not come across any (semi-)official website for these indications. I pulled these from my notes that I made while doing book scans myself. I think they came from some Usenet post.

Some v5 material still has a lot of errors (especially older publications where the fonts are not easily recognised by the OCR).

Anthon
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  • surely just means it is the 5th release – mmmmmm Mar 05 '14 at 16:14
  • @Mark Not for the Major number. For the minor version number, you could see that as a release. It seems to be mostly used when multiple people make cooperative reviews – Anthon Mar 05 '14 at 16:17