Die typos are very irritating

[angelbleu]

While I've only bought around two dozen books from Amazon's Kindle Store, I think I recall at least half of them having jarring typos that totally shatter my sense of immersion time and again.

Imagine being all tensed up reading an intense action scene in a page-turning novel, and suddenly:

"He stretched his arm forward, reaching for die gun..."

Die gun? Really?

I think I've seen cases of "die" replacing "the" in something like a third of my Kindle books. While there are many other types of typos I see in Kindle books, this must be the most frequent.

I don't think the actual books contain these wacky typos. Maybe the publishers are using some German OCR program to make the eBooks?

[Tiersten]

Mmm yeah. I've come across some OCR mistakes in books as well but I've even seen it in real books before. It is a bit annoying because it does interrupt your flow as you said.

Send Amazon an email to kindle-feedback@amazon.com. They may be able to get the publisher to correct the mistakes and update your eBook.

[murraypaul]

the -> die is a very common OCR error, along with ones like and -> arid.
They get through automated checks because both are valid dictionary words.

[wayrad]

Yes, it's not a typo, it's a scanno, caused by misrecognition of "th" as "di". Happens all the time - this is where regular expressions and the Word search & replace capability comes in useful when you're making an ebook, but it takes a human proofreader to catch 'em all.

[montalex]

I actually returned a book to Amazon because the formatting is terrible. They were apologetic, and gave me my money back immediately. They said that they can't check every edition that every publishers sends them. In this case, every time a word is in italic or bold, there is a paragraph break before and after the word. And the author uses italics every couple of pages, especially in dialog. Incredibly annoying. Unfortunately, it is a really terrific book, The Fall, by Simon Mawer. I assume that a complaint will get back to the publisher and get them to fix it. I actually exploded the mobi, and was fixing the errors in html myself. But that ruined the book for me, as I was essentially reading a paragraph every few pages.

Amazon is very good about issuing credits for problems with formatting, and should really insist, because they are so easy to fix -- compared with the old days: reprinting the whole run!

[reech]

I've only had to return one out of 10 books I've bought so far; Amazon will immediately refund.

Waterstones - the UK Store where I bought my ebooks when I had a Sony - refused any type of responsibility, and refused any type of refund, hence another good reason to ditch that lot for Amazon.

[curstpriest]

sad that publishers don't use software that detects common problems with text, there's one PG uses that works pretty well called GutCheck http://gutcheck.sourceforge.net/
It can grab most of those stupid OCR errors, like the ii and arid, along with missing quotes and whatnot. OCR is good today, but still not quite 100% ... more like 99.8%

[whitearrow]

I would encourage anyone who returns a book because of bad formatting to submit a report to Lost Book Sales. This site will become more influential if people report books they're either not buying or have returned for any reason.

[kindlekitten]

Originally Posted by whitearrow

I would encourage anyone who returns a book because of bad formatting to submit a report to Lost Book Sales. This site will become more influential if people report books they're either not buying or have returned for any reason.

oh! nice site! karma!

[mr ploppy]

The best OCR typo I ever read went "he fell over, anus and legs flailing". It took me a while to work out what it was supposed to say.

[reech]

That is actually worthwhile encountering - I'd by the book just for that munged line

[rcuadro]

how about
corner = comer
well = we11
drives me nuts!

[angelbleu]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

The best OCR typo I ever read went "he fell over, anus and legs flailing". It took me a while to work out what it was supposed to say.

Now, THAT'S what I call a typo!

Scannos are definitely quite common in scanned/OCRed books. However, there are a lot of non-scanned books loaded with typos as well. In an industry where people can self-publish you get a bit of garbage with the good. Some self-publishers (authors) don't spend the money to have their work edited, and it shows. I get quite annoyed reading news articles and other internet posts, written by so-called professionals, that are riddled with typos. Occasionally you will get an ebook like that too.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by jswinden

Scannos are definitely quite common in scanned/OCRed books. However, there are a lot of non-scanned books loaded with typos as well. In an industry where people can self-publish you get a bit of garbage with the good. Some self-publishers (authors) don't spend the money to have their work edited, and it shows. I get quite annoyed reading news articles and other internet posts, written by so-called professionals, that are riddled with typos. Occasionally you will get an ebook like that too.

It isn't just self pubbers that don't bother using proof readers, that is something the big publishers save money on too. I have yet to read any ebook that hasn't had at least some mistakes in it, most have lots of them. The same goes for real books I buy that have been published in the last 5 years or so.