Why is an ebook ever riddled with typos?

[MartinC]

Originally Posted by vxf

It's really the dark side of ebooks, if you ask me. Typos, poor formatting, omitted notes and introductions... the product is often as expensive as print, but seldom of the same quality.

The dark side of the brave new digital world, not just ebooks. Human skill and experience are devalued because the job can be done (sort of) by a machine. Come back Captain Swing, all is forgiven.

[b0ned0me]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Because I honestly haven't noticed any marked difference in the number of typos in ebooks compared to typos in print books.

My experience is similar - pbooks often have as many typos and homonyms as ebooks. Clearly they illiterates are running the presses these days.

Where ebooks tend to be really bad is in formatting and transcription errors, where you get linebreaks randomly inserted / removed and punction symbols turned into garbage characters. I think that's an inevitable consequence of books being produced as e.g. PDF or AZW and given a quick'n'dirty conversion into EPUB or whatever, but it is still irritating.

[holymadness]

I haven't noticed any errors in recently published books. I do notice plenty when I read back-catalogue titles that have clearly been scanned with OCR to produce a digital text. Funny thing is, even running a simple spellchecker would remove about half of these. However, if they're not being proofread at all, their accuracy is fairly impressive considering the results I get when I scan PDFs using ABBY Finereader. They must have some very powerful software at their disposal.

In theory, formatting for reflowable text should be a lot simpler than typesetting for a static layout, except in cases where there are special issues to consider, e.g. mathematical formulae. One thing that drives me nuts, though, is massive spacing between paragraphs. If you wouldn't do it for a print book, why would you do it for an ebook?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by b0ned0me

Where ebooks tend to be really bad is in formatting and transcription errors, where you get linebreaks randomly inserted / removed and punction symbols turned into garbage characters. I think that's an inevitable consequence of books being produced as e.g. PDF or AZW and given a quick'n'dirty conversion into EPUB or whatever, but it is still irritating.

I frankly haven't experienced much of that in my ebook purchases either. But like I said... I tend to mainly buy recently released/published (Big 6) books and I've been more than satisfied with the quality of those ebooks.

[vxf]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Perhaps you missed that part.

I don't know what your definition of 'backlist' is. I mention the 'Song of Ice and Fire' - the latest book, specifically, 'A Dance with Dragons'. Big seller, for a while on top of the lists. I bought it at release. Plenty of typos and formatting errors.

Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil - Penguin Group, April 2012. One of the Man Booker finalists. Not 'plenty of typos', but at least half a dozen really noticeable ones.

The worst copy of The Wealth of Nations is an April 2011 edition. Backlist? Perhaps, it's certainly not a fresh book. But it just happens to be perhaps the most important book in economics of all times, and you can't read it on e-ink without dealing with typos, omissions, formatting errors.

I could keep going, but I don't see the point.
But the idea that this is confined to small publishers, minor works or scanned text is just a fallacy.

[JD Gumby]

Originally Posted by vxf

The worst copy of The Wealth of Nations is an April 2011 edition. Backlist? Perhaps, it's certainly not a fresh book. But it just happens to be perhaps the most important book in economics of all times, and you can't read it on e-ink without dealing with typos, omissions, formatting errors.

Have you checked Project Gutenberg's edition (always the first place you should go for PD stuff, really, unless your ereader is tied to a specific store so tightly that sideloading's impossible)?

[DiapDealer]

I could keep going, but I don't see the point.
But the idea that this is confined to small publishers, minor works or scanned text is just a fallacy.

The only real "idea" I'm presenting is that I just don't see all the errors that everyone else seems to get up in arms about in the ebooks that I buy and read. That is all. So I'll go back to the very first explanation I suggested in this thread: maybe I've just been lucky all this time. And since I'm perfectly cool with just being lucky -- it seems I'm pretty much done here. I'm sorry you've had a less satisfying experience than I have. Truly.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by JD Gumby

Have you checked Project Gutenberg's edition (always the first place you should go for PD stuff . . .

Or the second, after Mobileread:

https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Harv..._at_MobileRead

[elcreative]

Some people spot every typo going... some read the book, get into the flow and don't... different strokes for different folks. I tend to spot more typos in non-fiction rather than fiction as I'm reading fiction for relaxation/entertainment far more than non-fiction and get absorbed in the world of the fiction but there are exceptions with something really "in your face" or in an unenjoyable, bad book...

[b0ned0me]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I frankly haven't experienced much of that in my ebook purchases either. But like I said... I tend to mainly buy recently released/published (Big 6) books and I've been more than satisfied with the quality of those ebooks.

I've had examples crop up in some Baen books I bought a couple of weeks ago. But then, Baen offer books in every format going. After downloading a zipfile of my chosen format from their server onto my mac, unpacking the zipfile, loading the PDF into Calibre and sending it to my PRS505, I get odd characters which look like they are caused by ASCII transcription errors.

Honestly, it's no surprise that something glitches along the way - I used to have the same problem at work where financial files from our mainframe would magically have a Č character in a name turned into a carriage return by the time they got to the customers unix server. That sort of stuff just happens, it's an illustration of how computery things are yet to reach the 'it just works' stage. Mildly irritating, but not enough to put me off the story - just like crappy paperpacks with smudgy ink and typesetting errors.

[Tony Richards]

Originally Posted by JD Gumby

*looks at thread title* Because publishers are cheap and can't be bothered to hire the same editors & proofreaders they'd use for their mass-market paperback versions (and greedy, of course, for not passing the savings resulting from the lack of physical manufacturing, transportation, and storage on to the consumer).

Wow -- wrong on several points. Most of the ebook editors I know who work for major publishing houses are badly overworked and heavily under-resourced (like their employers can't quite take in the fact yet that the revolution's happened). And while ebooks are cheap once they've been produced (see above), actually producing them in the first place is a lot of expense, taking into account the large number of different formats, which generally means that publishers have to farm the formatting work to outside agencies.

[DarkScribe]

Originally Posted by elcreative

Some people spot every typo going... some read the book, get into the flow and don't... different strokes for different folks. I tend to spot more typos in non-fiction rather than fiction as I'm reading fiction for relaxation/entertainment far more than non-fiction and get absorbed in the world of the fiction but there are exceptions with something really "in your face" or in an unenjoyable, bad book...

I would have as much chance of not seeing a typo or grammatical error when reading a book as I would of not noticing a wrong note in a piano piece. Particularly when they are common errors - since instead of as, your for you're, its with a possessive. Such things are not "typos" they are errors based on the ineptitude and poor erudition of the writer.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by Tony Richards

And while ebooks are cheap once they've been produced (see above), actually producing them in the first place is a lot of expense, taking into account the large number of different formats, which generally means that publishers have to farm the formatting work to outside agencies.

What large number of different formats? It's basically ePub and Kindle now. A lot of publishers don't even bother with a separate Kindle version and just upload their ePub to Amazon and let them convert it (and have been for quite some time).


I have no doubt that production departments at most publishers are under staffed.

[hughes]

Ereader manufacturers could build facilities to flag typos and pass them back to the publisher. Combine crowd sourcing of the proofreading process with frequent (continuous, even) updates from publishers and the typo problem would be solved.

[DrNefario]

When I did try to email some details of a poor book to the publisher, I couldn't even cut and paste a relevant extract from ADE because of the stupid DRM.