I'm not sure the Earley paper "is full of bugs" - to the best of my knowledge, it has only one bug (albeit a biggy), which is in its description of how to create a parse tree.
don't get me wrong: I like the earley parser :-) I just think the original paper has some omissions and the treatment of earley parsing in 'parsing techniques 2nd ed' is thorough and includes substantial references and explanations of further work.