MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Sick and tired of acting as proofreader for lazy publishers

Joques · 09-14-2014, 05:33 AM

I have had to correct a good many errors in my five years as a digital reader. But I'm reading Cryptonomicon right now, and there is a recurring error that has me baffled. I found that lots of places in the text, words are split into two, with a space between, like "eas ily" or "de forested". I assumed it was some kind of OCR-removal-of-hyphens procedure gone wrong, but just now I took a peek into the book with Calibre's editor, and it seems there are myriads of these strings inserted willy-nilly into the text - most of them invisible, but when one appears _inside_ of a word, you can see it. The string is:

<a id="page_x"></a>

where "x" is an integer. Does anybody have the faintest clue what purpose these strings serve, and why they should be scattered all over my book?

There's another, more easily explained error too: half the illustrations in the book are rotated 90 degrees. I have to assume this is laziness, stupidity or both.

I am getting _really_ sick and tired of publishers not doing their job - and for me to even do their job and correct their mistakes, I have to commit what is technically a crime.

09-14-2014, 05:33 AM	#1
Joques Addict Posts: 294 Karma: 107414 Join Date: May 2013 Device: Kobo Glo	Sick and tired of acting as proofreader for lazy publishers I have had to correct a good many errors in my five years as a digital reader. But I'm reading Cryptonomicon right now, and there is a recurring error that has me baffled. I found that lots of places in the text, words are split into two, with a space between, like "eas ily" or "de forested". I assumed it was some kind of OCR-removal-of-hyphens procedure gone wrong, but just now I took a peek into the book with Calibre's editor, and it seems there are myriads of these strings inserted willy-nilly into the text - most of them invisible, but when one appears _inside_ of a word, you can see it. The string is: <a id="page_x"></a> where "x" is an integer. Does anybody have the faintest clue what purpose these strings serve, and why they should be scattered all over my book? There's another, more easily explained error too: half the illustrations in the book are rotated 90 degrees. I have to assume this is laziness, stupidity or both. I am getting _really_ sick and tired of publishers not doing their job - and for me to even do their job and correct their mistakes, I have to commit what is technically a crime. Last edited by Joques; 09-14-2014 at 06:05 AM.