Quote:
Originally Posted by haertig
Is anyone else significantly bothered by poor proof reading?
I just finished Matthew Reilly's "Temple". The story was good, the writing was good (except for a few really over the top unrealistic sequences where I was rolling my eyes in stunned disbelief, but I can accept those in the name of fun).
But what made me almost put the book down unfinished were all the errors. The book was chock full of hyphenated words. At times it seemed like every multiple syllable word was hyphenated inappropriately. Multiple instances per written page. Then there was the obvious substitution of the word "the" for "die". And when they meant "150" it was written as "ISO". Want a capital letter "I"? Substitute a slash "/" instead. And it seemed like every sentence had at least one word in italics for emphasis. "Just be-cause a sen-tence has multi-syllable words that can be italicized and hyphen-ated doesn't mean that they should be!"
I'm not sure why it was so bad. It's almost like a poor quality Optical Character Recognition system was used to turn a typed manuscript into an eBook. Really disappointing. We aren't talking spelling/grammar errors here, this was just bizarre letter/word/symbol substitutions. I'm guessing the italics was intentional, although inappropriate for the most part.
Is anyone else bothered by poor quality control like this?
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"die" for "the" is a common ocr error. I haven't seen a bad ocr conversion like that in commercial book in a long time, and I think it was a older public domain book. It would cause me to return for a refund.