Learn English – What does drenched book mean

indian-englishmeaning-in-contextsentence-meaning

The first printed page in the scanned online version of Analytical Solid Geometry by Shanti Narayan says, "the book was drenched". I'm positive it doesn't have anything to do with wetness. So what does it mean here?
(There's nothing else written on the page. There are a couple of blank pages before and after this printed page.)

Screencap of scanned book

All the examples I've found are from Osmania University Library in Hyderabad. Could this be a term specific to Indian-English or a mistranslation from Hindi or another Indian language?

Best Answer

This is not an official source, but according to Charles Wm Dimmick on alt.folklore.urban Google Groups, the explanation is more plausible than that the book got wet.

It turns out that if I wait another few minutes the actual book is
there, but the "THIS BOOK IS DRENCHED" =A0is the first thing to appear.
Further research shows that this message shows up on about 40-50 books
which were digitized by Osmania University, and means that immediately
after digitizing the book they purged the physical book from their
collection.

Addition: Evidence that drenched means water damage: From Cyber Diary: Faceless Libraries in a Facebook Age, (Scroll down to Comment by Ananthanarayanan Vaidyanathan):

Recently the great Hindi Prachar Sabha Library at Madras...one of the biggest and greatest in India suffered due to the flood....We find that even in the digitized versions of many valuable books..that many pages are missing due to vandalism by borrowers or due to natural calamities like moth attack and drenching and so on. My heart sank when some very valuable books downloaded from sites like Osmania University contain the warning that the contents of the book are not complete due to missing pages, drenching, etc.....

Related Topic