I found an error-free book

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by hardcastle

Telling a company that their product is substandard is not an invitation for that company to then say, "well then fix it for us for free."

Proofreading is a profession. It's not easy, it's not free, and it's not the responsibility of the customer.

And I never said it was. I invite you to read my post, rather than just assume random things based on the fact that I disagree.

Please tell me where I have insinuated in any way, shape or form, that it is appropriate for companies to demand any such thing of their customers.

Meanwhile, perhaps we should start a petition for publishers to start obsessively searching their books for errors every time they get a crank call.

(P.S. I hate you for making me side with the Big 5 BWMs. )

[crich70]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

I read about 30 books a year, and I just finished reading a book published this century that didn't have any mistakes in it. The first one I have ever come across, and it was corporation published, too. Shame they don't credit the proofreader, I'd like to read more books like this.

Anyone else ever come across any error-free books first published this century?

Sounds like a rare avis in terra.

[icallaci]

<sigh> I have not yet read an error-free ebook. In fact, errors in ebooks are so prevalent that now typos in paper books jump out and grab me by the throat too (whereas I never really noticed them before). I once read an ebook that didn't have any errors until page 98. That is the record so far.

[crich70]

I read an ebook once that was filled with errors. Not spelling errors but formatting ones. Every few pages there would be a big gap in the text and then a few paragraphs followed by another big gap. I reported it to Amazon and they said they'd fix it. I haven't read the book in a while so I don't know if they did or it got lost in the shuffle.

[Ripplinger]

Originally Posted by Catlady

If you didn't count them, how did you come up with "well over 200"?

Why is it stupid for the publisher to ask for corrections to be sent to them if you claim there were so many?

By looking at the line number on the text editor I was listing them in. And that didn't count all the conversational words like 'bout where every instance of the word had the wrong facing single quote, there were 33 of those words scattered throughout the book.

Others already answered that which is how I pretty much feel about it. With that many errors, I really can't believe the book was ever proofread by a human before its release.

Originally Posted by Catlady

Perhaps the publisher was skeptical of the claim. Or wanted to know what the person considered an error. Were these supposedly factual errors, grammatical errors, alternate spellings, stylistic inconsistencies, unconventional punctuation, typos?

I've seen people call things errors that are not errors at all, but matters of author choice and editorial judgment.

But possibly the book in question was an unproofed OCR.

And yes, they were real errors, not a writing style choice. A lot of them were OCR errors not caught, such as two single quotes in place of a double quote, periods and commas in the middle of a sentence instead of a space between the words, Il in place of ll, wrong facing quotation marks, missing beginning or ending quotation marks, sometimes an extra set of quote marks were included, just to name a few. Wrong words picked up by the OCR such as "ouy" instead of "out," "stroking us beard" instead of "stroking his beard," really obvious errors that couldn't be mistaken as writing style. There were paragraphs split incorrectly in 2 in the middle of sentences, and instances where conversations by several different people weren't split into different paragraphs, just all run together.

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

It wasn't "Finnegan's Wake," was it?

Seriously, what was the name of this book?

The book was "Moonbog" by Rick Hautala. I've always loved his books, but hate the digital conversions of them all so far. Which is why I went through the trouble of emailing the publisher.

And they did list the copy editor at the beginning of the book. But I suspect that person worked off a hard copy and didn't then reread the OCR result.

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

It's a by-product of my mental health issues. Things that are wrong leap out at me. It also makes it impossible to watch TV with logos in the corner of the screen, even if they are almost invisible.

I don't mind the semi-transparent stationary logos in a corner of the screen, but I detest the content that keeps jumping, sliding and bouncing across the screen covering up as much as 1/3 of the screen. Those drive me absolutely nuts, US TV has gone crazy with covering shows and movies with more ads about other TV shows and movies.

When I read websites, errors jump out at me the same way. Those are usually just misspelled words though, but it still bothers me.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by Ripplinger

The book was "Moonbog" by Rick Hautala. I've always loved his books, but hate the digital conversions of them all so far. Which is why I went through the trouble of emailing the publisher.

I looked up the book at Amazon, and see the publisher is listed as something called Crossroad Press. This caught my eye:

We have a small army of folks working for us proofing and copy-editing, mostly for the love of books, or for free reading of the rest of our library.

Professionals don't proofread and copyedit for free reading material or the love of books. No wonder the output is substandard.

I mistakenly thought you were talking about a book from a major publisher.

[hardcastle]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

And I never said it was. I invite you to read my post, rather than just assume random things based on the fact that I disagree.

Please tell me where I have insinuated in any way, shape or form, that it is appropriate for companies to demand any such thing of their customers.

Meanwhile, perhaps we should start a petition for publishers to start obsessively searching their books for errors every time they get a crank call.

(P.S. I hate you for making me side with the Big 5 BWMs. )

I didn't assume, you belittled the OP for not giving up the information, as if he had any obligation to do so.

This was not a logical jump. Write a better post next time.

[bgalbrecht]

Crossroads reminds me a bit of the science fiction author who heard about other authors who had created ebooks to sell at the usual retailers by starting with the darknet versions on the internet. Unfortunately he didn't do a very good job of proofreading (if any), and the darknet version was full of crappy OCR where the formatting got lost. One egregious example of short sentences of dialog made it impossible to determine who was speaking after about the third sentence because of the loss of formatting.

[Ripplinger]

I haven't seen a darknet version of it, but I've seen some public domain books scanned like that, and honestly they're such a mess that you can't really make heads or tails out of it even if you wanted to correct it. Unless of course you have a hard copy available or at least the original scanned pages before someone who didn't know what they were doing turned it into an OCR mess.

If you charge for a book, I expect you to be professional enough to provide a decent copy of the text. Which means proofreading by a human being who understands grammar and punctuation and formatting. If you charge for it, it's your responsibility.

[JSWolf]

I've read a number of eBooks from BPHs where I have not noticed any errors. The last six Star Trek eBooks I've read all came through without any found errors.

[icallaci]

My problem is that early ebooks were so full of errors that I came to expect the errors. Now ebooks are much better, but I am so conditioned to look for errors that I see things that never bothered me before, e.g., two single quotes instead of a double quote, italics that include the beginning quote but not the ending quote (or vice versa), inconsistent paragraph indents, blockquotes, line-spacing, etc. I don't much care what the PH's standard is, as long as it is consistent throughout the book. But it seems that is too much to expect just yet.

[Luffy]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I've read a number of eBooks from BPHs where I have not noticed any errors. The last six Star Trek eBooks I've read all came through without any found errors.

Same here. Books in retail condition very rarely have typos.

[icallaci]

Originally Posted by Luffy

Same here. Books in retail condition very rarely have typos.

Retail ebooks rarely have glaring typos nowadays. But even retail books have errors, and now I can't help but see them. When I check the printed version, sure enough, the same errors are usually in the printed book as well. So I am doomed to roam the universe, unable to ignore typos in anything made up of words I can see. Maybe I should switch to audiobooks.

[mandy314]

Originally Posted by Luffy

Books in retail condition very rarely have typos.

Should be qualified perhaps.
An example - Winston Graham: The Little Walls (from 1955, republished as ebook in 2013 by Bello (PanMacmillan))

‘‘We’d better try this; evening’’ I said, it as soon as it goes dark.’’

snippet from Chapter 3

The book has all kind of errors mentioned in this thread (OCR artifacts, hit-and-miss punctuation and quotation marks, hard line-breaks inside paragraphs ...). Isn't a big deal for me, but I can't see it being the product of "a bad day in the office for the OCR team" when even errors are found which should have been fixed with a simple spell-checking.
I've encountered a good deal of errors in OCRed books republished in recent years by major publishers. New releases are much better done (as error-free as pbooks and much more consistently formatted I think). An example for this: much enjoyed "The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons" by Lawrence Block - would be hard pressed to recall an error in this very nicely styled ebook.

[DreamWriter]

I have yet to read an error-free book. One did come very close, though. That e-book had a singular mistake: a period at the close of dialogue where there should've been a comma. It was very difficult to detect.