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Originally Posted by ATDrake
I am refraining from using the rolling on the floor laughing smiley face because actually, it's rather depressingly common to have fairly high-priced books coming out from their original publishing houses via legit booksellers be riddled with typos, messed-up layouts, and other rather noticeable errors.
I've had a number I paid for come out with some very annoying "does no one even look at these things before they start charging money for them?!?!" obvious errors, which I've described in some detail over in this post, if you're morbidly curious about Stuff That Can Go Wrong. I bought all those particular Amazon-purchased examples on sale, but they are regularly list-priced at $9.99 each before any applicable discounts.
We've had a number of dedicated threads about the matter in the General Discussions forums.
However, in most cases it is true that generally the typos are relatively minor (albeit annoying) and not usually worth going to the bother to fix for a book one doesn't intend to re-read all that often (or at all). |
I will head over to the thread you linked above and read, but I appreciate your taking the time to reply. While I certainly had encountered spelling errors in books I've read, there had only been a couple that were so horrible I couldn't get through them and I attributed that to questionable sources...
I literally had no idea this would occur with regularily priced books. For the most part I guess I've been lucky.
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The simplest way to do this is really to learn how to extract the contents of any given ebook file and do some minor editing of the text in an editor, then pass the corrected file back to your conversion software of choice*. Depending on where you buy your books and whether or not they have DRM from that source, you may first need to remove said DRM to extract the text, which of course we cannot discuss directly here on MR.
For advanced formatting errors, you will probably have to learn a bit about HTML and CSS to be able to fix, but they're pretty easy to learn the basics of and there are plenty of helpful introductory tutorials for absolute beginners on the web.
The best format to start from for fixing and eventual conversion to the output for your reader is an ePub source, or an extracted HTML that you can modify into an ePub because you can preserve niceties such as cover images and metadata and tables of contents/navigation without having to remake them every time you go back and modify the file.
And you can ask questions and get plenty of answers in our dedicated file format and software app forums right here on MR.
Hope this helps.
* Or just learn to hand-assemble an ePub, which is really easy and just requires a text editor and a zip utility.
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I'm not really a very tech-savvy person, but I will keep your information in mind should I ever encounter a book that requires that length of correction.
Once again I appreciate your taking the time to reply to a relative newbie and I certainly appreciate your patience.
