Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Scanning takes literally minutes per book, if one is allowed to destroy the original. (I'm assuming "chop the spine off" counts as destruction.)
OCR software is much better now. And while good formatting takes substantial time, and so does a line-by-line proof, a read-through proof by a competent editor shouldn't take more than a few hours for a 200-page book--maybe 1 day if it's troublesome, has a lot of unique names or specialized terminology.
A really careful proof would indeed take many days; a proof pass that would catch errors on the title page, repeated uses of "tlie" for "the" (common OCR error for some fonts), and line-break errors, would not.
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Well I did specify meticulous
I have read a couple of books that have die for the or he for the. Never thought about it being the font.
By meticulous I was talking about a person who sits there with a paper book and compares line by line. I believe that is what HarryT often does.
I also think this is not done by most, but my impression from a google search is that proofreading companies charge $6 per page for easy to proof books or documents.
My main point although perhaps poorly expressed is that even if Amazon was to take on the burden of having all of the books they sell proofread in the most basic form, their might not be enough proofreaders out there to accomplish this in a timely manner.
I would think that Amazon has the books that they actually publish proofread, but I don't know.
Maybe they could have a separate rating system, with choices of:
Definitely proofread
Sort of proofread
Possibly proofread
What a joke
Myself, I only buy books from authors I love, and generally they have been around for a while and the quality is better than acceptable. If it is a tad crappy, chances are I am fairly forgiving because I love the author.
New authors I get from the library, as well as many from familiar authors, which may seem limiting, but I can always find a book to read and enjoy most of them. Quality of library books has improved immensely in the last 3 years.
But on the article cited in the original post, why would anyone buy book 20 from the kindle store if a good portion of the previous 19 were extremely inferior? I'd be kind of embarrassed to whine about it publicly.
Helen