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Originally Posted by toddos
Either you've just been lucky, or you're only buying new release novels that are following a modern workflow as Hitch has already explained. Backlist novels don't fare nearly so well, and yet we're still expected to spend $10-15 on them. Any other product with that level of quality would be quickly returned to stores. Fortunately for publishers, only Amazon has a generous return policy. Others, like Barnes & Noble, don't allow any returns at all (though you can try to sweet talk customer support).
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I mostly have bought backlist. Most have been relatively recent--last ten years or so--but some are vintage pulp reissues from the thirties, forties, and fifties. Don't know what the process was on those, but they've been just fine--no major errors.
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Also, not every new-release book is error free, either. I just finished a book (to remain nameless, but it's not Cormac McCarthy who's allowed to write like an infant because he's earned it) where every single instance of a "X have" contraction that should've been "X've" was written as "X of". "Would of", "could of", "I'd of" (which should've been "I'd have"), etc. The first one occurred in the first couple of pages as part of dialogue and I let it go. But it soon happened outside of dialogue (so it was not an affectation of speech) and quickly grated on my nerves. For my own sanity, I edited the book myself and fixed all of those instances. Now to be fair I'm pretty sure this was just as poorly written on paper (and it was a NY Times best seller of 2009!), but the instances of "te le vision" and multiple other improperly-added spaces were definitely ebook artifacts.
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My first question is, Did this book have a first-person narrator? If
of was used throughout, the author had to have made a specific choice to do that, for whatever reason, and clearly the publisher accepted that choice. Editing it to your liking is just
wrong! It's like an author using present tense, and you change it to past tense because you prefer past tense. My second question is, What's the name of the book/author/publisher?