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What a joy it is to find some kindred spirits in this discussion re typos in ebooks!
I've been a proofreader since 1957 (spending 20 years of that time as the boss of a newspaper reading room); now I'm "retired" and running my own editing/proofreading business.
Late last century, newspaper publishers decided it was more economical to dispense with reading rooms and rely on their journalists to write and correct their own material, with some amusing consequences.
In my home town, the [statewide] daily instituted a box on its letters pages declaiming that it is "committed to accurate, fair and fearless publication of news and commentary". This subsequently became known as the "OOPS!" column or the "BAD JOKE" column among the staff when it first appeared due to the few and very selective occasions that it admitted that a mistake had appeared in the pages.
Now, in this electronic world, when anybody can write and "publish" anything in cyberspace without any form of editorial control (and certainly no proofreading input), it seems the chickens have come home to roost.
The use of OCR technology shows the limitations of its own usefulness in transcribing the printed word to its electronic form.
Unfortunately, the standard of education today means that more and more "readers" are seeing fewer and fewer literals when they scan a page, with less appreciation of any mistakes they encounter.
It also means that these same "readers" present the words they put out there in a barely readable form as far as intelligible discourse is concerned. They might know what they meant to say, but it's obvious they haven't proofread their own entries, thereby losing any impact their statements might have had.
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