Typos in ebooks

[1611mac]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I take it that was deliberate?

good catch!

[John the Miner]

Not a typo in the usual cases we are talking about, but I used to work for the state education department.
Every year they'd stack on a slap-up dinner for all the department's bigwigs. One year I got to proofread the menu at the last minute. Among the gustatory delights on offer for the night was "roast prostitute".
I guess the spellchecker couldn't find "prosciutto" in its dictionary.
Another time, in my early days at a newspaper, I proofread a full-page broadsheet ad for a clothing store. The ad was for men's shirts and featured a diagonal line from bottom left to top right saying MEN'S SHIRTS in hand-picked three-inch poster type (you know the size and font that used to decorate a wire frame outside newsagents' shops blatting the day's headlines -- another thing that's gone the way of spats, or the dodo).
Well, the comp who set the ad up on the stone, the galley boy who pulled the proof, the proofreader who read it (me), the copyholder who read the ad to me, the linotype operator who corrected the typos in it, the comp who inserted the correx, the proofreader who revised it (me, again), the stereo bloke who put the stone under the press for flonging, the press tech who paginated the pages, the press room guy who ran his eye over the machine proof -- all overlooked the missing R in the big line of type.
Think of the legendary image of the editor running down the steps to the press room screaming "Stop the presses! Stop the presses!"? Well ...
I believe they ran about 20,000 copies of the paper through until they could stop the presses. The editor gave strict instructions that not one was to be allowed to leave the building and ordered that every last one had to be pulped, under pain of instant dismissal.
I fronted him and he said, "I'm not blaming you; you couldn't be so stupid as to let that one go deliberately. Or are you?"
Somehow or other, I survived.

[Tonycole]

Superb! I wish all the typos I am confronted with in almost every ebook I read these days was as funny as that one!
I mostly get my ebooks from sources such as Smashwords, and invariably they are full of typos.
Given that the prices are generally in the $2 area, I should perhaps not be too critical, but I feel strongly that any author who has any pride in his or her work should take the trouble to proof read their masterpiece carefully.
Am I wrong in this idea?
www.ebookanoid.com

[Michael J Hunt]

Because publishers these days expect high standards of self-editing from new writers, I shall be running a workshop on the subject at a literary festival next week. I've never tried such a workshop before although I've been running novel writing support groups for the last five years. While there are obvious overlaps, it wasn't until I was preparing suitable exercises that I became aware of the differences between the two subjects. I'd be really interested to hear comments about this and I wonder if others have thought of bringing would-be novel writers from their home towns together to try something similar.

Here's my introductory quote:

Self-editing isn't so much correcting grammar but making it more effective; it doesn’t require a deep knowledge of grammar – it’s more instinctual. You’re aware that something isn’t quite right, so you fix it. It doesn’t mean that what you’ve written is ungrammatical, it may just be a bit ‘clunky’.

[sourcejedi]

Originally Posted by Tonycole

I mostly get my ebooks from sources such as Smashwords, and invariably they are full of typos.
Given that the prices are generally in the $2 area, I should perhaps not be too critical, but I feel strongly that any author who has any pride in his or her work should take the trouble to proof read their masterpiece carefully.
Am I wrong in this idea?

Please don't dump unrelated URLs into conversation . That's what people use signatures for.

I think there's actually a reasonable argument in favour of typos or other simple mistakes that produce non-dictionary words. Often the eye will skip over them without noticing. And naively running a spellchecker over something can produce even worse results. If there's a tradeoff between a laborious proof-reading of spelling and typing, v.s. honing word choices, grammar, and how well sentences flow, etc., I'd rather a budding author spent their finite time and enthusiasm on the latter.

I'd much prefer a brainfart like "we we" for "we were"... even something like "struggle to breath[e]"... than common incorrect usage, like "should of" (should've), or multiple long sentences in sore need of a comma or two.

Or to put it another way -- there's a fantasy with adult elements that's written as a serial online (read: blog), as a full-time job, where after several years the author still relies on commenters to correct multiple errors per post. Perhaps it's an unfair comparison, but it does work really well. I don't see why Smashwords doesn't encourage and support fixing of typos (or scannos in backlist material) by readers.

[raac]

There is no question that e-books contain errors not present in the original. Here is a excerpt of an e-mail I sent to Penguin today.

<quoting>
I recently bought the e-book version of Collapse, by Jared Diamond. The book itself is excellent, but the e-book has a number of deficiences not present in the paper version, despite the latter being cheaper in some stores.

Firstly, the e-book version contains none of the images (apart from maps) present in the original. Other e-books contain images and the devices are able to display them, so why have the been removed from this book? Secondly, the text contains references to the missing images. Obviously little care has been taken in editing when converting from paper to e-book format. Thirdly, the index is useless: it is merely an alphabetical list which contains no page numbers or hyper-links to the listed terms. Fourthly, there seems to be some problem with the font embedding because on my Sony PRS-950 some character are rendered as question marks. This occurs for all the symbols separating terms in the chapter summary lists, and for some characters which have accents.

. . .

E-books have a number of disadvantages for the reader, such as an inability to lend or sell them. If, despite this, you wish to charge the same price as the physical book then, please, at least create them with same care and do not remove content present in the original.
</quoting>


I always write to publishers when stuff like this happens. They must be told that it's not acceptable to sending out half-baked jobs of this sort.

[wodin]

I understand seeing typos in books derived from the darknet, where pbooks have been scanned and OCRed. OCR is not an exact science and errors inevitably crop up, but I don't understand why there are typos in ebooks from publishers.

After all, they already have electronic versions of the books that feed the typesetting software. Even the most entry level programmer should be able to produce a script to convert that to any ebook format necessary. So why do we still get typos??

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by wodin

I understand seeing typos in books derived from the darknet, where pbooks have been scanned and OCRed. OCR is not an exact science and errors inevitably crop up, but I don't understand why there are typos in ebooks from publishers.

After all, they already have electronic versions of the books that feed the typesetting software. Even the most entry level programmer should be able to produce a script to convert that to any ebook format necessary. So why do we still get typos??

Part of the problem is that a lot of publishers use a PDF file as the source for the eBooks and that always brings it's own set of problems.

[raac]

I just don't buy that as a suitable excuse. A publisher should be proofing what they sell. Why is it the case that ebooks are exempt from that? The example I cite above has nothing to do with OCR errors, it's just a shoddy job.

I suspect what's happened is that publishers are falling over themselves to enter the e-book market, but that the production pipeline for books is still in its infancy. The market was originally too small for them to devote many resources to it. That's changing and I hope the quality will follow suit.

[DiapDealer]

I can honestly say that after several years and purchasing hundreds of ebooks, I've only had one that I would consider absolutely shoddy--with regard to formatting. I returned it for a refund and contacted the author, who put me in touch with someone from the publisher who wanted location numbers and examples of the errors.

All of the rest have had the occasional typo that I'm willing to overlook since the same typos occur in most of the Dead Trees I buy as well.

[wodin]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Part of the problem is that a lot of publishers use a PDF file as the source for the eBooks and that always brings it's own set of problems.

I doubt if the authors are writing in Adobe Acrobat.

[elcreative]

The publishers make PRINT books... one of the primary standards for final format (to send to printers) is PDF... since it is the format actually used , it often is the only format retained by the publisher and this then has to be converted to the relevant eReader formats... Nobody suggested that authors write in Acrobat but equally the publishers would have had no reason to maintain anything other than the final format used...

Originally Posted by wodin

I doubt if the authors are writing in Adobe Acrobat.

[paola]

Originally Posted by raac

There is no question that e-books contain errors not present in the original. Here is a excerpt of an e-mail I sent to Penguin today.

<quoting>
I recently bought the e-book version of Collapse, by Jared Diamond. The book itself is excellent, but the e-book has a number of deficiences not present in the paper version, despite the latter being cheaper in some stores.

Firstly, the e-book version contains none of the images (apart from maps) present in the original. Other e-books contain images and the devices are able to display them, so why have the been removed from this book? Secondly, the text contains references to the missing images. Obviously little care has been taken in editing when converting from paper to e-book format. Thirdly, the index is useless: it is merely an alphabetical list which contains no page numbers or hyper-links to the listed terms. Fourthly, there seems to be some problem with the font embedding because on my Sony PRS-950 some character are rendered as question marks. This occurs for all the symbols separating terms in the chapter summary lists, and for some characters which have accents.

. . .

E-books have a number of disadvantages for the reader, such as an inability to lend or sell them. If, despite this, you wish to charge the same price as the physical book then, please, at least create them with same care and do not remove content present in the original.
</quoting>


I always write to publishers when stuff like this happens. They must be told that it's not acceptable to sending out half-baked jobs of this sort.

I find that Penguin produced the ebook version without all of the images outrageous: I am very curious to know what they replied to you (hope they did!)

[bizzybody]

Originally Posted by raac

There is no question that e-books contain errors not present in the original. Here is a excerpt of an e-mail I sent to Penguin today.

<quoting>
Fourthly, there seems to be some problem with the font embedding because on my Sony PRS-950 some character are rendered as question marks. This occurs for all the symbols separating terms in the chapter summary lists, and for some characters which have accents.
</quoting>

Check to see if your Sony PRS-950 supports Unicode. If not, you'll get those character issues. The only way to fix them on a device that has no Unicode support is to edit the source to replace Unicode characters with their ASCII or Windows-1251 equivalents - if the book and your device are English.

Another possibility on non-Unicode devices is for the reader software to provide its own support for it, but that's something I've yet to see in action.

Most devices, like Palm OS PDAs and phones, without native Unicode support are never going to get a software update to add it.

Here I reiterate my pitch for the OUR or One Ultimate Reader app. Cross platform for iOS, Palm, WebOS, Android, Windows, Linux, Symbian etc. and able to open Mobi/Kindle, ePub, Rocket, TealDoc, PalmDoc, Plucker and more - while providing its own Unicode support for platforms that don't have it.

Just needs some coders who really love to read and are fed up with the multitude of e-book formats and having to run multiple apps to read them.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by raac

Fourthly, there seems to be some problem with the font embedding because on my Sony PRS-950 some character are rendered as question marks.

Is there really an embedded font? It could be that there's nothing wrong in the book, just that the default font in the PRS-950 (and others) does not have those particular characters. Should a book contain workarounds for the case some reader does not provide a reasonably complete font (or the possibility of selecting a customized font)? I don't think so.

Originally Posted by wodin

After all, they already have electronic versions of the books that feed the typesetting software.

I'm afraid that's where the reasoning fails. It seems most publishers don't have electronic versions of the books they publish, at most they have the print-ready PDF versions they send to the printer, as others have said.