Typos in ebooks

[WarnerYoung]

Originally Posted by kceb10

I've heard alot of you guys complaining about typos in ebooks but have not really seen very many maybe 1 per book, until i read Moreta, dragonlady of pern by Anne McCaffery this book has so many typos i almost stopped reading it. There had to be close to one every other page i was very dissapointed in this book

Which format of ebook was it? That might make a difference. I found a number of errors in The Lord of the Rings (eReader.com's PDB format), but when I looked at an excerpt of it in B&N's EPUB version, those errors weren't there.

And one every other page is good, compared to Mercedes Lackey's By The Sword (again, PDB format).

In any case, I suspect that any time it's an older book and there are a lot of errors, it's likely to be scanning and OCR errors.

[Tonycole]

Hi all, I have had agreement from Alex here to use material from this thread as part of a new page on my Blog (www.ebookanoid.com) which I shall call something like Typos - Hall of Shame.

The idea is to build up a whole page of reports of the worst typos in the eBooks we buy, in an attempt to shame the publishers into doing their proof reading properly.

But I also need your individual agreement to use your comments in this page, so if you are OK with me doing this, could you let me know by means of an email to:

tony@ebookanoid.com

Best wishes and thanks,

Tony

[aagstn]

Just bought League of Frightened Men by Rex Stout this week in eReader format. It is a Random House book but has several OCR errors. I've found one or two each chapter. Random House is charging a $15 suggested price for this book and can't be bothered to proofread it for errors.

[Patricia29]

I have found all kinds of errors in all of the books I have downloaded from Sony's Reader Store, the worst one so far is James Micheners book "Caravans": He'll becomes hell, we'll becomes well, names of characters and places are spelled differently on the same page. Hyphens and capital letters are added all over the place, it takes all the pleasure away from reading and is an insult to the authors.
It should not be difficult to edit ebooks properly, unless this is another example of outsourcing to third world countries.

Originally Posted by Michael J Hunt

I've just posted the following on the 'smell of books' thread and I think it would be just as appropriate for it to be here as well:

I'm an ignoramus about e-book readers as I don't own one. But I do have three e-books 'out there' and I'm curious to know how they appear on (or in) an e-reader. When I look at the pdf versions on my computer screen there's absolutely nothing about them that is different to their paper counterparts. Am I being naive, but aren't all books published in both forms identical? Could this only be true for books that are published with the intention of their appearing in both forms? Also, is it possible for unwanted errors to creep in during conversion from one format to another? If this is so, surely the publisher should subject the final pdf version to a proof-read before he sells it.

As an editor I'm probably more aware than most people of typos in professionally produced manuscripts. If there's only one, or perhaps two, in a book, I consider that to be not sufficient to put me off a book. If there are more than two, I find I continue to read with half my mind fixed on when I'm going to find the next. So, for me, errors can be distracting.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by Patricia29

I have found all kinds of errors in all of the books I have downloaded from Sony's Reader Store, the worst one so far is James Micheners book "Caravans": He'll becomes hell, we'll becomes well, names of characters and places are spelled differently on the same page. Hyphens and capital letters are added all over the place, it takes all the pleasure away from reading and is an insult to the authors.
It should not be difficult to edit ebooks properly, unless this is another example of outsourcing to third world countries.

I suggest that you send the details of the errors to toni cole at tony@ebookanoid.com. He is a member of MobileRead Forum, and also has a blog where he is trying to publicise typos in ebooks - as part of a Hall of Shame enterprise.

Regards, Alex

[mcgriff]

Last book I read, Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie, had a typo near the end of the book. Kinda ruined the mood as the story line was resolving. I had to pause and read the word a few times in shock that the error was in print. I can't direct you to the other errors I have recently seen as I read so much. Any more I expect to find an error in any book I buy.

[DJHARKAVY]

My wife is a professional proofreader/editor. She cannot read books, paper or e, without finding tons of errors that she thinks a proofer SHOULD have caught.

There are more errors in eBooks, as a function of OCR error (although that should not be the case in books printed more recently) but I rarely find enough to damage my reading experience. I can usually figure out what is meant from context and you would be amazed at how much we tend to do so automatically.

[Maggie Leung]

Originally Posted by DJHARKAVY

My wife is a professional proofreader/editor. She cannot read books, paper or e, without finding tons of errors that she thinks a proofer SHOULD have caught.

There are more errors in eBooks, as a function of OCR error (although that should not be the case in books printed more recently) but I rarely find enough to damage my reading experience. I can usually figure out what is meant from context and you would be amazed at how much we tend to do so automatically.

I also edit for a living. Unless I'm working, I overlook errors. Otherwise, they'd take all the fun out of reading.

[DJHARKAVY]

Originally Posted by Maggie Leung

I also edit for a living. Unless I'm working, I overlook errors. Otherwise, they'd take all the fun out of reading.

Is your experience the same as hers?

[Maggie Leung]

Originally Posted by DJHARKAVY

Is your experience the same as hers?

Yes, it is.

[Michael J Hunt]

I, too, am an editor and my family objects intensely when I 'edit' our conversations. Is there something I could take to prevent this from happening?

MJ

[Maggie Leung]

Originally Posted by Michael J Hunt

I, too, am an editor and my family objects intensely when I 'edit' our conversations. Is there something I could take to prevent this from happening?

MJ

Maybe aversion therapy? You could wear a rubberband around your wrist and they could snap it as needed, lol.

[BooksForABuck]

At BooksForABuck.com, we edit all of our books, send the edited MS back to the author for review, then go through the MS again once they're back from the author. Yet, still, some typographical errors sneak through. Unfortunately, I've been seeing more and more typos and errors in books put out by the big publishers as well. Not sure if that's because there are more or because I've become hypersensitized to errors as a result of my job.

Simply put, books are like software programs...it's impossible to eliminate all bugs, but we spend a lot of time and money testing to minimize the number and severity.

Rob Preece
Publisher, BooksForABuck.com

[calvin-c]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Conversion between "text" formats - ePub, Lit, Mobi, etc - should be "lossless" as far as the actual text is concerned. You may, however, lose formatting in the process.

At least partially this depends on your definition of text. I've seen many cases where conversion between formats has 'lost' characters it didn't recognize, usually punctuation or other symbols. (curly quotation marks & apostrophe's are particularly common, also foreign characters although those are less common.)

Another artifact I've often seen from conversions is 'added' text. Usually this is because the original used some sort of markup language that the conversion didn't recognize and, reasonably, anything it doesn't recognize it treats as text. The result is sometimes things like "Joe said <emp>&quotHold on!&quot</emp>" easily recognizable as 1) a non-HTML markup tag and 2) an erroneously typed HTML symbol code.

I'll note that neither of the above *should* be a problem in a conversion program, but they are. Whether or not it's a problem with the conversion program is something else that depends on your definition. It's been said that the best documentation for a program is the source code-that describes *exactly* what the program will handle and, by omission, what it won't.

In that case, using the program to convert files containing 'text' it won't handle is operator error rather than a problem with the program. That's not a practical definition, but I think it points out why there's a gray area when defining what constitutes a problem in a conversion program.

But, regardless of whether it's a problem in the conversion program or in how it's used, the fact remains that conversion programs can introduce errors that don't exist in the original document, and not just in formatting.

[susan_cassidy]

I recently read "Jane and the Man of the Cloth", by Stephanie Barron on my Kindle, and it had hundreds of OCR errors. Many were 'gentle' rendered as 'gende', including 'gendeman' for 'gentleman', etc. It was horrific, since the book was set in Regency times, and words like gentleman are used constantly. I highlighted every one I could, and sent the list to Amazon, with a complaint. They refunded my money, and I see that the book is not currently available for Kindle. The first book in the series had some typos, too, but not quite as bad. I enjoyed the story, but the typos were a constant irritant.

Many errors could be caught with spell-check, and a couple of little programs that could catch things like improper spacing around hyphens, and maybe validating proper names against a list for the book in question.

When they are too lazy to run spell-check, it really makes me mad.