Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
What I cannot accept, though, are books that are full of spelling and grammatical errors, such as using "it's" where it should be "its", or "your" instead of "you're". That's just plain and simple ignorance and, for me, makes any book an automatic "fail".
Can I ask you a question, please? This isn't a criticism - just curiosity. In the text I've quoted above, you refer to a "0.99c ebook". I've seen many people say that their book costs "0.99c", when it turns out that they really mean that it costs 99c. Why do people write "0.99c" when they mean 99c? This seems to be a uniquely American phenomenon: I've never seen a British author say that their book costs 0.99p when they mean 99p.
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I need an editor for my posts.
Want the job?
I'm Australian, and a few more seconds thought would have had me remove the "c" or remove the "0.". Australia suffers a sort of schizophrenic influence from both UK and America. The core comes from the UK, but American influences have slowly insinuated themselves, largely thanks to TV and the Internet. I suspect this may be especially bad for software developers, like myself, where we have to get used to using "color" (for example) in an API, and then make hard choices about how we document our code. (eg: Is something like this: "To change the colour of the text use the Font.Color property." sensible?)
But, back to the point. I agree that books that a full of blatant errors simply should not happen. If a writer doesn't have the skill to fix them then they need to enlist the help of someone that can (paid or otherwise). Of course, in ignorance, they may not even realise the mistakes exist. But "full" can be a subjective term in this context. Some readers are very sensitive to even a few errors, others pass blithely over them. I suspect a lot depends on the quality of the story aside from those mistakes.