No, ficbot means my comment on the the
TeleRead post (scroll to end).
Note that that's the closest I've seen anyone come to a public complaint. My reaction is not the normal one.
Suggestion: They're available in the Kindle store, which includes free samples. Install the Safari or Chrome browser, and you should be able to read the sample in Amazon's new Cloud Reader. Then you can make your own judgment.
If you're not a copy-editor, most of the glitches won't bother you. You'll read through half of them without even noticing anything. (Don't believe me? Count the word "the" in the first sentence of this post :-).
20-100 total errata, with
less than 5 "real word errors", is surprisingly tolerable. The count includes stuff like spaces around quotation marks, and everything I found afterwards using Project Gutenberg style semi-automated checks. Closer to acne than a plague, I think. It's better than the publisher's first effort (and much better than Google scans of public domain books!).
The "real word error" count also overstates the problem slightly; they include some textbook "stealth scannos". I didn't notice "comer" for "corner" when I was reading it. And I don't think I would have noticed "bum" for "burn" if I wasn't making notes. (What's most disturbing is
not the way it changes the meaning of the sentence. It's that if you realize there's a mistake, the word seems to keep flipping back to the
correct spelling. It's freakier than the the doubled word thing).
I just didn't think it was fair to leave the impression that the International versions (or at least the first three) were free of "typos". Since I reported the errors, I was able to put a rough figure on it. Sorry if the numbers give the wrong impression, but I'm not sure how else to put it.
... and I can try to put it in context, but it's difficult to know how it affects different people. Multiple people rated the original version of GCA from Webscription.net highly. When I came to read it, the ebook was crippled by hundreds of missing paragraph breaks and spurious paragraph breaks where there shouldn't have been. I wasn't able to read [I]that[/I book without feeling like I'd turned into a copy-editor.
If you're happy with the backlist sci-fi from E-reads, I don't think you'll have a problem. When I looked at Anvil of Stars from fictionwise/e-reads, it worked out as somewhere upwards of 20 errors. (And that's excluding the quotation marks, which alternate randomly between straight and curly quotes).
I could post the patches for the first three books, if anyone wants to play with them. (unzip, patch, zip). That'd cover the individual errors I suggested corrections for. (It'd exclude any general formatting issues, for example). Also, I think the "human readable" (ish) versions I sent to the author give a fairly good idea of what to expect.