Typos: Who Cares?

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Deskisamess

I think it has more to do with the reader's education level, at least to start with.

Nah. The limit of my official education is unfinished high school, and I do notice errors, both in English and in my native language. OTOH I know several people with college-level education who make plenty of grammar mistakes. Rather it depends on how sensitive one is to these types of mistakes. Some people don't notice grammar mistakes, but spot errors in anything to do with numbers immediately, for example.

I agree with the rest of your post, that it shouldn't really be the reader's responsibility. If you ask money for your product, then the quality should be worth that money.

[DiapDealer]

I've returned exactly one ebook in my life for any reason. That was because definitive paragraph breaks and section breaks were non-existent (the author sent me a fixed gratis copy for emailing him about the issue -- which was a kindlebook-only problem). Other than that, I've hardly ever purchased a book (e or p) where typos, misspellings, or formatting were a memorable issue.

I'm a college graduate, for whatever that's worth. As I mentioned elsewhere, I have many different reading "modes" at my disposal. I CAN read more critically (work-related), but I can also turn it off (thankfully) when reading fiction for pure entertainment purposes. It has nothing to do with not caring. It's more of a self-preservation thing. Books have errors. I'm not going to stress myself out focusing on them (the errors, not the books). Not when I can turn on my own internal autocorrect and not have to worry about minor issues. And books with major problems don't seem to find their way through my discovery process very often.

[Ripplinger]

Typos drive me nuts in a book, instantly pulling me out of the story. My brain just screams how could they miss that? Words left out, mispelled words (one book even had the main character named mispelled), using "she" instead of "he" referring to a male character, missed quotation marks for speech, they all drive me nuts. It looks sloppy and unprofessional, and after I've paid good money for a book, yes, I expect better. If you charge money for a book, you're expected to give your readers some quality.

No, I've never written a book (as said before, the corrections are what editors and proof readers are for). But having scanned a few old books and doing my own OCR, I've read and reread those books as many as five times to catch every typo before I considered them finished. I can understand an author not having any desire to do that... let a handful of your friends or family do it, you're bound to catch most of them. But just running it through some spell check program doesn't cut it.

I used to mark every typo in ebooks with a bookmark and go back and correct them when I finished, it bugs me that much. But I realized I was spending too much time on that when I could be reading the next book, so I finally quit doing that.

I can live with a typo here and there, but when you have more than 10 in a book, shame on you for charging money for your readers to be your proof readers.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Of course. The same with formatting, many people don't care how a book is formatted, others insist it be formatted exactly as they want or else.

Although the funny thing is that for me I'm only obsessive about a book's formatting when it's an ebook. The main thing being that it has a ragged right margin so there isn't the occasional uneven spacing between words, and that it uses a serif font for the body text (I use a big sledge hammer and remove all font-family stuff and specify the font on my ereader).

With printed books I'm oblivous about the formatting. Fortunately with them the formatting is always reasonable and I've haven't yet seen a fiction book that uses sans serif.

[maddz]

I suppose on of the reasons typos bother me is that I'm a scientist, educated to post grad level. To me, things have to be accurate - I was trained to understand IUPAC nomenclature and there is a reason to be accurate: something ending in the suffix -ane is different to the same compound that ends in -ene or -yne. Mixing them up mean completely different chemicals.

Even though it's been over 30 years since I've had to use this, I still nitpick and obvious typos bother me enough that I wonder what else the author has got wrong.

[JSWolf]

The first version of Hyperion by Dan Simmons was chock full of errors including some character names. It's since been fixed. But if you tried to read the first version, it would have been a chore. It was OCRed, but very poorly proofed.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by hobnail

Although the funny thing is that for me I'm only obsessive about a book's formatting when it's an ebook. The main thing being that it has a ragged right margin so there isn't the occasional uneven spacing between words, and that it uses a serif font for the body text (I use a big sledge hammer and remove all font-family stuff and specify the font on my ereader).

With printed books I'm oblivous about the formatting. Fortunately with them the formatting is always reasonable and I've haven't yet seen a fiction book that uses sans serif.

Part of the spacing issue is Printed books have more options that the render engines offer. so the huge gaps are less frequent.

Still, It does take a careful type setter and proofing that cares.

OTOH e-books can have almost infinite (corrective) updates, as there are no press runs or plates. A Wham Bam, edit session and an upload to the host.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by hobnail

Although the funny thing is that for me I'm only obsessive about a book's formatting when it's an ebook. The main thing being that it has a ragged right margin so there isn't the occasional uneven spacing between words, and that it uses a serif font for the body text (I use a big sledge hammer and remove all font-family stuff and specify the font on my ereader).

There are ways around that issue of gaps for full justified if you use a Kobo or Kindle. Do you use either Reader brand?

[Catlady]

I think there are typos and then there are typos. Say letters are transposed in a word--well, stuff happens. That's different from misuse of homophones--like discrete for discreet, or defuse for diffuse--especially if it happens more than once, which indicates to me that the author/proofreader was oblivious to the misuse. (I once read a book wherein characters kept sitting on their hunches around a campfire.)

I also consider continuity errors as more than simple typos. Characters with changing eye color, timeline screw-ups, etc.--those mistakes indicate sloppiness.

So when people say ten typos are too many--it depends. I can easily forgive ten discrete misspellings in a 300-pp. book; I would be furious at ten continuity errors and send nasty letters.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

The Horror!

But seriously, it seems some readers are more sensitive that others. The occasional errant hyphen doesn't bother me. I only really care if the meaning of the text becomes obstructed or harder to decipher. I've read a lot of old poorly scanned pdf files in my time.

I don't like when the formatting is not nice. Sometimes some eBooks can be poorly formatted and (IMHO) need fixing. One thing that can cause a problem in some Readers these eBooks that have hundreds of extra CSS.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by maddz

I suppose on of the reasons typos bother me is that I'm a scientist, educated to post grad level.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Catlady

So when people say ten typos are too many--it depends. I can easily forgive ten discrete misspellings in a 300-pp. book; I would be furious at ten continuity errors and send nasty letters.

Agreed (minus the sending of nasty letters).

[ps67]

I hate typos, I think it is a individual sensibility.

I don't think that the tolerance of typos depends on the level of school that someone attended because there are different sensibilities in this forum and the members of this forum are all person that read a lot (otherwise we should not be here) and surely They know enough spelling and grammar to notice errors.

Of course if somebody has not the competence to notice errors the situation is different.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

There are ways around that issue of gaps for full justified if you use a Kobo or Kindle. Do you use either Reader brand?

I'm using a Kobo but I don't install patches or whatever, I just use the options that are built in, so removing the text-align: justified does the job for me. It also allows me to correct things like font size, font face, margins, etc.

[MarjaE]

I sometimes find typos annoying. But I find grammatical differences, and especially slurs, a lot worse.

Different English-speakers have different grammar. Dangling adverbs drive me nuts. But "split verbs" and "split infinitives" drive some other people nuts. What's good grammar for me is bad grammar for them, and vice-versa.