Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
But I see no reason to trust anonymous reviews. Besides, I have, in the past, bought ebooks with 4- and 5-star reviews only to wonder what idiots gave the books so many stars. The books were riddled with errors and clearly unedited. All it proves is that the reviewers are no more knowledgeable than many of the writers about grammar and language.
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While I also tend to be turned off from a book when there are lots of editorial errors, I have also read books that were "rough" but which had great stories and which I greatly enjoyed. Since I've started reading independent books I've taken to using the highlight feature on my Kindle to indicate errors I find as I read; when I'm done I send the text file that result to the author. It takes about 10 minutes of my time and I've always gotten back grateful thanks for the effort.
I'm not trying to apologize for errors or say editing isn't important, just that finding mistakes in a book doesn't and shouldn't automatically disqualify it from high ratings. Of course if there's an error on every page, that should affect the rating, especially if they are signficant and/or obvious enough to hinder the reading experience. Though my experience, at least at Amazon, has been that any indie book that has more than 2-3 reviews will note the presence of editorial mistakes if there are any at all in the book. In fact editing issues seems to be the most common type of comment that I see in book reviews these days.