Quote:
Originally Posted by Sylver
... I believe all the new books published nowadays have digital templates of some sort first, so a precise soft copy should have already existed before the hard copy even goes to print, so I really cannot understand why and how ebook version of these new books can ever get so many typos and errors...
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This is a bit off your main topic but...
What you are missing is that the print edition goes through several different electronic formats during its migration to the end of the line production software. The last software to handle the books is the layout software and it is in that form that the last corrections are made.
The last layout software is not necessarily something that can output files for ebook production. In such cases the ebook source files must be forked off at some earlier point where the text is in software that can generate files that can be migrated to ebook production tools. As a result, the last corrections aren't included and must be recreated manually. A step that is all too often omitted or done poorly.
There is also the likelyhood that some of the typos seen in ebooks also exist in the print version. I'm currently re-reading Joanna Russ' "We Who Are About To...", serialized in the January and February issues of Galaxy Science Fiction, and have been somewhat surprised by the number of errors (typos, missing words or parts of words, ...). I'm reading the original printed edition and not a re-print, neither electronic nor paper.