Badly proofed e-books

[ficbot]

I am on a major reading binge, and am having bit of a pet peeve with badly proof-read ebooks. I don't even mean the occasional formatting glitch (I have had a few titles with wonky characters where accent marks or em-dashes might be) but I am talking about shoddy copy-editing. I am reading one right now which has characters named Jimmy, Jeannie and Jordy. I am about halfway through, and at least once, they have said 'Jeannie' when they clearly mean 'Jimmy' from the context. Several times, Jimmy has been called 'Jimmie.' And sometimes with quotation marks, there will be words after the close quote that should have been within the quote e.g.
'It's okay' Dad, she said.

I don't want to write to Fictionwise again. They already gave me an unasked for refund with the book which had the accent problems (I informed them of the problem, said it was not a huge issue and I still read the book but that if they should correct it, I would like to be notified so I could re-download, and they just refunded me the book). Anyway, I don't want to be a problem customer and exceed some hidden refund quota or something But this bothers me that the author or publisher or whomever was so careless and did such a bad job with this. This is a 'major' ebook author with over 60 books at Fictionwise, and either he should know better or he should perhaps focus more on quality than on quantity at this point. It's books like this which make people think ebooks are inferior reading which would not be accepted by a mainstream publisher. And there are customers like me who have paid legitimate money for these products, so an ebook we buy should have some standard of quality that it has been checked like a 'real' book, shouldn't it? If I wanted to read a book riddled with careless errors, I could read off the Darknet, but this is a book I PAID for.

[whitearrow]

This happens all the time, and it's infuriating.

I'm reading a book by a major author from Amazon, and "1" is instead of "I" is used about 30 percent of the time. They also use the obnoxious double-spacing between paragraphs instead of proper indenting.

I think we need to keep complaining. Unless we demand proper formatting and the same standard of copy editing as p-books, we aren't going to get it.

[Abecedary]

I'm currently reading the free copy of Free from the Sony store and it has a number of minor typographical errors (I've been comparing it to the copy at scribd.com). Most notably, nearly every mention of 'Free' in the book is lowercased (a la 'free'), when they are in fact supposed to be initial capped. The author does this to distinguish the specific type of 'free' that he's referring to in most examples in the book, to separate it from the more common uses of the word 'free' with which we are familiar. I probably wouldn't have noticed this had 'monty Python' and the 'free Software Foundation' not been mentioned fairly early in the book. I'm curious if this is the way the Kindle version of the book is, too. Anyone?

[doreenjoy]

I think this is a common problem when paper books are scanned, rather than being properly e-formatted from the original electronic file.

[whitearrow]

It may be a common problem, but that's no excuse. Companies are selling these books for money -- they deserve the same attention and care that printed books do.

[doreenjoy]

Oh, I agree. I wasn't making excuses. It's particularly annoying when a simple spell check would have caught the mistake.

I know of at least one e-publishing company that spends a significant amount on proofreading, even though they e-format from the original edited RTFs. IMO it's the print publishers who give the e-books the short shrift.

[Abecedary]

It's not just scanned books. I found a number of minor issues with an ePub file I bought that had been exported from InDesign. However, most of those problems were almost certainly due to markup tweaks that the ebook designer made (a missing letter at the end of a line where a <br /> tag had been added, missing space after a bolded footnote marker, etc).

From what I can tell, it looks like the source materials used for the ebooks are generally pretty clean from a proofing standpoint, but there really doesn't seem to be any rigorous proofing after the ebooks have been created. This is contrary to the method used for print, where the final layout versions get one or more thorough proofing passes (of course this doesn't always catch all the mistakes either). Since a fair amount of stylization tweaking gets done during the layout process (for print) and coding process (for ebooks), the output versions from both processes need to be rigorously looked over, which isn't happening.

Of course, it also doesn't help that many of the publishers are leaving the ebook formatting up to the resellers.

[starrigger]

Originally Posted by Abecedary

From what I can tell, it looks like the source materials used for the ebooks are generally pretty clean from a proofing standpoint, but there really doesn't seem to be any rigorous proofing after the ebooks have been created. This is contrary to the method used for print, where the final layout versions get one or more thorough proofing passes (of course this doesn't always catch all the mistakes either). Since a fair amount of stylization tweaking gets done during the layout process (for print) and coding process (for ebooks), the output versions from both processes need to be rigorously looked over, which isn't happening.

Of course, it also doesn't help that many of the publishers are leaving the ebook formatting up to the resellers.

You've nailed it. For a recent release of a bunch of my books, I spent many hours proofing RTFs with the help of an able volunteer. But when the books went to the retailers for conversion, there was no further point of control at my end. With the exception of Baen Webscriptions, none of the retailers provided copies for checking or even as a courtesy. I had to depend on purchasers to let me know how they came out. (Mixed.)

There is no good system for quality control once the file is out of the author's or publisher's hands. So don't blame the author, who probably doesn't even know his/her book got screwed over.

[carld]

It's sadly uncommon these days to read through an ebook without finding at least one error, usually several, and that just in casual for-pleasure reading. I noticed a few errors in Weapons of Choice, slightly marring an otherwise excellent book.

[Andybaby]

I gloss over most errors. but if I paid for a book. I expect it to be perfect.

[HarryT]

This is precisely why many of us who upload books here spend some many hours proof-reading them.

[lemon lime]

On a somewhat related note, I'm reading what I thought was a poorly proofed Pillars of the Earth by Follet. A lot of words are misspelled, or rather, they're missing their last letters. Then I came across a portion where there was obviously a paragraph missing. I re-downloaded it from CyberRead, (de-drm'ed it) and checked the new version on the desktop mobipocket reader to make sure the paragraph was there. I then transferred the new version to my Bebook (OI firmware) -- where the paragraph is still missing! I came across another mispelled word, checked my PC, and sure enough the word is spelled correctly. Is Bebook/OI eating text? I've only just switched to OI recently, and the book I've read previous to this was an epub, without these problems. (I should post this on the OI board, shouldn't I?)

[HarryT]

Does the missing text appear using the standard BeBook firmware? If so, then as you say, it would appear to indicate a bug in OI.

[lemon lime]

Just tried the Jinke firmware and the text is there. OI as suspected, then.

[Renaldo]

Originally Posted by ficbot

I am reading one right now which has characters named Jimmy, Jeannie and Jordy. I am about halfway through, and at least once, they have said 'Jeannie' when they clearly mean 'Jimmy' from the context. Several times, Jimmy has been called 'Jimmie.' And sometimes with quotation marks, there will be words after the close quote that should have been within the quote e.g.
'It's okay' Dad, she said.

I've had this problem with a lot of ebooks from Fictionwise too. Mainly it seems to be coming from certain authors/small publishers. I'm not talking about a formating problem, or bad scanning like a 1 instead of a l, or ": o" instead of to. But names getting mixed around, objects changing (a paper notepad magically became a laptop halfway through one book), areas where changes had been marked to be changed, but no one went back to change them; like a sentence that says, "He walked slowly down the hallmovedeasilydownthehall." Just like that, a replacement phrase tacked on without spacing. What really gets me is that spell or grammar check would take care of those. But really, it comes down to sloppy editing and writing. These are obviously gallies if not third drafts, definitely not a final product. And while they are small authors and publishers, they have dozens of books or stories out on Fictionwise and other sites. It's ridiculous.