[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by cybmole

for my own reading, I have taken to using sigil to fix annoying typos ins what should be good quality sold books.

I do the same thing. As I read, I have a piece of paper where I mark every single little typo/mistake that I find... and then I go fix it in Sigil to create an ultimate copy.

Luckily, almost everything I read is CC3.0 or in the Public Domain, so I just release my Fixed copy for the world (and hope the publisher updates their copy on their site/Amazon/B&N/elsewhere).

This is actually how I got my job! I kept bugging the publisher with all of my emails with fixed EPUBs.... and they finally decided to give in to my conversion superiority! I just completed my 200th book conversion not too long ago.

Originally Posted by cybmole

1. the book is called SLIVER OF TRUTH, but the title page has, in huge letters, SILVER OF TRUTH. how did that one slip through the net ?.

Title Pages, usually these are just type it in two seconds and forget it! I must admit, a few of those have slipped through me while I have been making EPUBs. (Who looks at Title Pages in ebooks anyway? I think the metadata being correct is much more important... now messing that up is embarrassing!).

Originally Posted by cybmole

( it also has a forced embedded font which is very hard to read, compared to my e-readers default font, but I have to hack the book in order to be able to change font)

This just needs to die. This can also happen in many cases where they export directly out of something like InDesign + embed their fonts.... or if they try to design for iBooks instead of the general ebook market.

Embedded fonts should only be used extremely sparingly if at all.

Originally Posted by cybmole

2. the book is Cloud Of Sparrows, It has a character called Hidé, with the accented e. That's fine, but much of the time he's called Hid#233; which is very annoying. I see that that's almost the correct html for an accented e special character, but not quite, it needs a & in place of the # I assume. I checked that one in 3 programs, sigil book view, Sony reader for PC, and my actual Sony T3 reader. that's how it is in all 3 views!

Indeed, you are correct.

This could have just been crappy conversions from previous material (let us say they had an old .lit file, ran it through a converter, and popped out an EPUB).

Or maybe something went wrong when flipping between different encodings.

Or it could have just been a horrible search/replace.

This whole horrible conversions reminds me of a few books I purchased from B&N. I read the entirety of the Wild Cards series (22 books so far). There were two in the series published by "Ibooks, Inc." which were HORRIBLE conversions:

• #16 (Deuces Down)
• #17 (Death Draws Five)

Here is a screenshot of #17... You can see they fed it right into calibre with all the wrong settings:



I mean.. chapters weren't event split! There was no TOC!

And they were just riddled with errors/typos left and right.

Originally Posted by cybmole

would it be a total waste of time to compose emails to the publishers, assuming I can even find an email address ?

You can try and hope for the best... perhaps they might take notice. In many cases though, your complaints go unheard.

If you can't get a hold of the publisher, maybe leaving your complaints/fixes in an Amazon Review?

If that fails, maybe just put it up on a site somewhere. (I really wish that there was a large Typo Database, where everyone can submit the mistakes they find).

I settled on this format for physical books/PDFs:

Page 123: par. 1: typo/explanation

Here is a sample sentence that I copied from the book which has a tpyo.

par. 0 if the paragraph carries over from the previous page. You can use other positions if it makes more sense (bottom paragraph, top paragraph, first paragraph after blockquote, ...). As long as it just helps quickly narrow the position down for a typesetter besides having just the page number on which the error occurred.

(Forgive the self-promotion) Here is an example of it in action for this book that I took off of Archive.org and converted, "Speeches, Arguments, Addresses, and Letters of Clement L. Vallandigham": http://misesbooks.blogspot.com/2013/...esses-and.html

(Forgive the self-promotion) For digital books... if there are a massive amount of typos, I typically use a code comparison program (I personally use Beyond Compare). And I compare the before/after. Then I would email that to the publisher + your fixed version + an explanation.

"On Doing the Right Thing" by Albert J. Nock was a conversion that I was paid to clean up. Attached to this post:

• ZIP file there is an HTML file generated by Beyond Compare
• Before/after EPUBs
• The original PDF