Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Errors are common in "back catalogue" stuff, but I very rarely see egrarious errors in new books. I believe you are mistaken in saying that traditional publishers do not employ proof-readers.
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This is actually the whole reason I got into publishing. I got a Kindle for my birthday about a year ago and I chose an early-nineties Hiaasen book by Penguin to christen it. That ebook cost $14.99. I paid because that was the book I wanted to read and, even though I had a $.25 used paperback copy of it in my "to-read" bag, I wanted to support the whole digital movement.
That was until I saw incomprehensible errors on nearly every page of that eBook. The best one was squirrel being spelled as "sqv1m3l." And no, I'm not exaggerating. That sent me googling to figure out why the quality was so bad. I learned that all the big publishing houses have no digital copies of their own material--even a lot of stuff that was digital at some point. So they essentially have an intern sitting there running OCR on a paperback and posting it directly for sale.
Makes me sick. And I paid $14.99 for that garbage. And I'm sure that book had already made the publisher gobs of money when it was new and out in print as well.
The errors in old content from big publishers are OCR-related. The errors from new writers are due to a lack of proofreading.