[acprinter]

There seems to be a daily barrage of postings complaining of poor support from either Sony or Amazon. Almost all of the complaints have nothing to do with Sony or Amazon. Come on people, put your complaints where they really need to be placed, the publishers.

The publishers are not doing their job of proper formatting or proofreading. I suspect that in many cases books are not even looked at (proofread).

Does anybody know where the formatting of many books are done? I suspect that they are farmed out to third world countries where the people do not speak English or whatever other language the book is written in.

As a retired printer, I can say that in our printshop all of the people in the shop were required to at least give the printed sheets we were handling some proofreading. Errors not picked up by the proofreaders were often picked up by the printers and bindery people. Today many of the books are printed in China and I see horrible mistakes that would never have gotten out of our shop.

The ebook formatting and proofing are even worse than the printed books; I suspect that the publishers just think perfect books materialize out of thin air.

I also wonder if today's dependence on getting something done quick rather than well has had an impact. If a publisher is using OCR to scan the author's work into an electronic format (whether for distribution electronically or printed), this may be the source of many of the errors. My wife proofreads for Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders. The scans frequently mis-read common words (and becomes arid for example). The OCR text is proofread three times to catch as many errors as possible. Yes, of course, errors still do get through. But it is also amazing the errors missed in early rounds of proofreading.

So, again, its not Sony or Amazon. They are given the work; they are not the source!

I have that off my chest know so I feel better and I am going to head outdoors and plant 10 grape plants and get the garden ready for veggies.