Sick and tired of acting as proofreader for lazy publishers

[JSWolf]

I checked my ePub copy of Cryptonomicon and it reads...

Randy has spent al<a id="page_540"/>most no time

There are no extra spaces there.

[Joques]

Ok, I just tried gbm's search string, and it worked like a charm. Of course I still have to go through it manually, but now I can just use the find and find/replace buttons, which is a LOT less cumbersome than what I had been doing.

Thank you very kindly, everybody who helped!

Now, how about them bad proofreaders, eh?

[Joques]

JSWolf, that is strange? When did you buy yours? Did they go back and correct the book after I bought it?

[Joques]

The strangest thing: By the 86th chapter, the tags stopped appearing inside words altogether - only between words and paragraphs. And the extra spaces to either side of the tags also stopped appearing. So somebody started doing a better formatting job at a very late stage in the process

[cromag]

Is there any chance that you got this ebook from a vendor which maintains a library of your purchases and permits you to re-download it? After all this time it's possible that the publisher responded to complaints and fixed the file.

[Joques]

Cromag, I bought it at the now-defunct booksonboard.com, sadly

Edit: Either way, I have now corrected my own file, so it's a moot point. And I learned a whole lot about editing in the process

[cromag]

Yeah, I was sure it would turn out to be something like that, but I had to ask.

[GeoffR]

I wish publishers would read the books they publish too, but after almost two years of ereading now I have worked out that it is easier just to fix the mistakes myself and get on with reading.

Since ebooks are so much cheaper than paper I can afford to spend 5 or 10 minutes fixing the publisher's mistakes and still come out well ahead.

[Joques]

Geoff, 5-10 minutes is OK, but an hour or two is definitely not. And I have spent that, most recently with the Thomas Covenant books.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Joques

JSWolf, that is strange? When did you buy yours? Did they go back and correct the book after I bought it?

I'm not sure when I did get mine. One thing I have noticed via Overdrive is that a lot of ePub eBook get updated from when they first get released and we don't get notified so we can download a newer copy. It's possible that if we go back to the shop(s) we bought from and download again that we'd get some updated eBooks. But I do with we'd be notified when eBooks are updated.

Even Amazon doesn't always notify us of updates to eBooks. When I had to reinstall KindleforPC earlier this summer, I downloaded all of my Kindle eBooks and I did end up with more KF8 eBooks then I had before. So I know they've been updated even if just to add KF8 format.

[DiapDealer]

@Joques: third-party, calibre-plugin-modified, "kepubified" version aside ... are you absolutely certain the epub you have represents the virgin retail version you bought five years ago?

[theducks]

There are a couple of REGEX threads in Sigil and Calibre.
Most work in both (PCRE based REGEX) Editors..

Is it possible that those Tools introduced the extra spaces?
Does a un-liberated copy exhibit this condition (obviously, you won't be able to see the code )

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

@Joques: third-party, calibre-plugin-modified, "kepubified" version aside ... are you absolutely certain the epub you have represents the virgin retail version you bought five years ago?

I can verify that the sample of the code that Joques posted is definitely from an original retail copy. Cryptonomicon has been updated since then as I showed with a different ePub code snippet.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I can verify that the sample of the code that Joques posted is definitely from an original retail copy. Cryptonomicon has been updated since then as I showed with a different ePub code snippet.

Let me get this straight. You verified the code that was posted was from an original retail copy by posting different code from a different--possibly updated--retail epub? Color me unconvinced.

Unless you have the same original retail version as Joques, you can't really verify anything (except that the same words were used).

I just want to know if it's possible that a conversion or other automated plugin modification/edit might have have gotten its hands on the original markup sometime in the last in the last five years.

Not that I'm trying to suggest that publisher errors don't happen and aren't annoying as hell at times. I just want to make sure "additional processing" didn't introduce the issue. Even if the original were still protected with DRM, it wouldn't be hard to look up the same passages in ADE and see if the words are split in the way being described.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Let me get this straight. You verified the code that was posted was from an original retail copy by posting different code from a different--possibly updated--retail epub? Color me unconvinced.

Unless you have the same original retail version as Joques, you can't really verify anything (except that the same words were used).

I could send you copy of the same version that Joques has if you'd like to see. Someone I know who has read it sent me a copy since it was bought when it first came out and the code is the same. So I do have the newer updated copy and the older error filled copy. I'm not going to be keeping the older copy as the newer copy is better for when I finally get it off my TBR pile and get to reading it.