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Old 04-19-2011, 02:26 AM   #24
Quexos
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I think that all in all, the book industry is awfully and unacceptably remiss. Proofreading is one of the basic processes of the creation of a book. You don't buy a television with say the frame not the right shape of the screen or a car with one of the wheels bigger than the others or not perfectly round ... but e-books are sold with the text being seriously flawed. Not one or two words errors across any given book but scores, sometimes hundreds (over a hundred in Stephen King's IT I can personally confirm)
If for some technical reason it would be very hard or almost impossible to have the books error free then I could perhaps understand like for the dead pixels issue in Televisions. But this is not the case for a very simple reason: You don't have all those errors in print books so there is no acceptable reason to have them in the e-book versions. The book industry have people proofreading the paper books but it seems no one to do the job on e-books ? I don't buy that. What is the excuse ? how can it be more expensive or time consuming or any other problem proofreading electronic vs print ? Hell, they could even have it proofread by readers. They could release any book a little earlier to a small selection of beta readers at half the price or something and get feedback for the errors which are easy to spot as we all have seen, then correct them and only then release the book to the general public (if paying a professional proofreader is such a problem for them)

Quote:
Originally Posted by GreenMonkey View Post
I'm particularly sensitive, I think, to typos. Even the few DRM'd retail books I've purchased, I've found a few typos in.

I just got a book from Smashwords ("The Kingdoms of the Night" by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch) and found a bunch of errors in it. They had the hardcovers at the local used bookstore but I went with the ebook version instead from Smashwords instead...maybe my mistake.

I finally installed Sigil and I've started bookmarking the errors as I read, and correcting them later.

If I'm not sure what the word should be, a careful google books search will generally get me the sentence so I can confirm it.
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