Quote:
Originally Posted by nekokami
I'd accept quite a few OCR errors in the Baen Free Library, but it would be nice if publishers could recover at least some of their costs by selling backlist ebooks. And I can see that science fiction, in particular, would be tricky to OCR, because of the high incidence of non-dictionary words (including the occasional weird punctuation and even fictional alphabets).
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SF and fantasy can be a bit trickier... but that's why you put 2 people on the back-checking job, and they'll have to rely on actual reading, not Word spell-check.
In fact, many people do proofreading of even trickier text every day, in technical industry and government documents that use proprietary words, industry-specific acronyms, equations or symbols that a computer-based spell-checker can't check, or in some cases even flag. The best way to do it is to hire people that can give full attention to the subject, especially if it is an interest of theirs, but preferably if they have indicated enough accuracy with that type of genre to be considered reliable with it. It's not impossible, it just requires dedication to the effort.
A lot of people wonder about the future of editors when the world starts publishing digitally outside of publishing houses... well, this might be one of the areas that editors will end up taking over, since they should have the training and experience to do back-checking.
And the way I see it, besides editors, with so many people out there looking for work, and all the people that are house-bound, you have a sizeable population that could do the text-checking job for just a reasonable salary. If editors don't go into back-checking, they would end up managers of the back-checkers.