Badly proofed e-books

[griffonwing]

For anyone who read my post and heard me whining, or for starrigger who thought I was offering career advice, I do apologize. Neither was my intent. I do not know the field of writing, bu I wish to learn of it. I do know that past trends, current trends, and future trends are all in a mish-mash right now. Some publishers (and even writers) who think the old way is good enough and don't need to change. New writers who feel that they can't effectively do their job because their publishers don't want to step into the new technology, so they have to do their own editing/formats.

Like Elfwreck said, the current spell-/grammar-check programs are just smart enough to screw up. It would be nice to find a simple word processor that can save to all of the main formats. I have InDesign CS4, and it will save to txt, rtf, doc, pdf, epub. Maybe a couple more, not sure. There may even be plug-ins for ID that will export to more formats. I'd rather export to a format than use a conversion software.

Anyway, i do hope the publishers will start to better take care of their writers and take more pride in their published works. Releasing badly formatted, unproofed ebooks will not only diminish the books they sale, but also the writers they support.

[starrigger]

What Charlie said, basically. Eventually, all the publishers will have ebook production incorporated into their typesetting workflow, and the conversion and formatting software won't be so buggy, and they won't be trying to support a dozen legacy ebook formats (as Fictionwise does, with their multiformat books). And we'll see better results.

In the interim, I do think it's reasonable to expect somewhat better quality control at the conversion level. Certainly we've all seen books in which even a cursory inspection of the final product would reveal the need for another pass. I'd like to see a model in which the publisher does the conversions, and the same finished files go out to all the retailers. At least in that scenario, mistakes--when caught--would be easier to remedy.

[morriss003]

I will answer this as a guilty author. I just finished and uploaded "Sam's Winnings" to smashwords.com. Once the book had been formatted, I started reading the book to see if everything was ok. Wince, wince, and wince again. All I can say in my defense, is that I read the book, while looking for mistakes, several times. Yet, once it was uploaded, I found several more. Reupload. I have noticed that once a book is in a different font, or size, I find many of the mistakes that I miss on the first several readings. This has to be a vision thing. The brain is wired this way. I suppose that is why having an editor is nice. Someone with a different vision thing.

[HarryT]

It's very difficult to proof-read your own work, because your brain knows what "should" be there, and "sees" that. It really does need to be done by a third party.

[ficbot]

Originally Posted by starrigger

General reply:
Writers want to be writers, not publishers. If they start spending all this time doing the production for the publishers (for editions that for most writers won't earn more than beer money), they stop being writers. Trust me, I know firsthand.

This attitude bothers me. If you view your writing as a hobby and an art, fine. But then, don't expect to earn a living at it. If you expect to earn a living at it because it's a business, then just like any other job, there will be vital things you must do which you may not like. I am a teacher, I am good at it and that is my job. I dislike playground duty, am not good at it, and resent spending time on it when I could be doing teaching stuff, but it's part of the job so I do it. Every job has things like this.

To reiterate one more time, everyone seems to think I am expecting authors to proof-read for formatting mistakes in multiple e-versions. I am not not. I am expecting authors to proofread for CONTENT mistakes in the actual story, like Jimmy being called Jimmie and things like this. That is a very different thing, and imho that IS the author's 'job' certainly if he is charging people money for the book.

[Sparrow]

I'd welcome any tips on proofreading from the experts here.
I'm correcting a text version of a PDF scan at the moment, so loads of errors to spot.
Setting the font to Courier New is helping, because I find individual letters are easier to discern with a monospace font.
Each time I spot a typo I do a global 'search and replace' to correct all occurrences (checking each one before amending).
Afterwards I'll do searches for spaces where they shouldn't be, a spell check run, search for common mistakes (e.g. 'hut' instead of 'but') etc.

But that's pretty basic stuff - anyone know any more sophisticated tips?

[HarryT]

Really the only way to "properly" proof-read is to have the eBook and the original document side by side, and read them "in parallel", looking for discrepencies. It's very, very time-consuming, but if you want to do a first-rate job it's the only way.

[starrigger]

Originally Posted by ficbot

This attitude bothers me. If you view your writing as a hobby and an art, fine. But then, don't expect to earn a living at it. If you expect to earn a living at it because it's a business, then just like any other job, there will be vital things you must do which you may not like. I am a teacher, I am good at it and that is my job. I dislike playground duty, am not good at it, and resent spending time on it when I could be doing teaching stuff, but it's part of the job so I do it. Every job has things like this.

Well, shucks, why didn't somebody tell me writing was hard work and you have to do chores you don't like? Dang! I would have looked for another career!

News flash! All the writers I know proof things until they're blue in the face. And yet things still go wrong, and sometimes we can't do anything about it.

To reiterate one more time, everyone seems to think I am expecting authors to proof-read for formatting mistakes in multiple e-versions. I am not not. I am expecting authors to proofread for CONTENT mistakes in the actual story, like Jimmy being called Jimmie and things like this. That is a very different thing, and imho that IS the author's 'job' certainly if he is charging people money for the book.

Of course we proof for content. I never said we shouldn't. That said, it's the publisher's job to make sure that the content we give them is the same as the content that goes to press. We do our part, and they (usually) do their part.

If you're talking about someone self-publishing, that's a different story. Then they're writer and publisher.

On the other hand, if you're talking about a backlist title being OCR's and put into ebook form, there's an excellent chance that the writer was never even offered a chance to proof the scan. Or, that the writer made the reasonable assumption that the publisher would do his/her job and see to it that the newly published text was the same as the original text.

Really the only way to "properly" proof-read is to have the eBook and the original document side by side, and read them "in parallel", looking for discrepencies. It's very, very time-consuming, but if you want to do a first-rate job it's the only way.

That's exactly right, and I'm probably an idiot, because I'm doing that right now with the source text to my Alien Speedway novel, instead of leaving it to the publisher, because I'm a perfectionist fool. It is extremely time consuming, and from a business point of view, I probably should not be spending the time.

Sorry for getting testy. But you've got the most ebook-friendly authors in the business commenting here, so maybe lecturing us on what we should be doing isn't the most helpful approach. Most writers couldn't care less about the ebooks, because, as Charlie said, ebook sales suck. It's not yet a significant part of the business model. That's something I hope to see change.

[carld]

I don't mind a few typos, though they tend to distract me from what I'm reading. I noted a couple errors in Serial as I was reading it yesterday. If I remember right I did a double take at the use of "weather" for "whether."

I wonder if it would help to have the computer or Kindle read the text to you as read along in the document. I haven't tried it yet as I have a Kindle1 and don't care for the voice that comes with Vista at all.

[ficbot]

I had a long reply which just got eaten by the forum gremlins. Yuck. I'll make this one briefer.

Jeffery, all I was doing was responding to what YOU said about 'writers should be writers.' But I think there IS a difference between a hobby writer and a 'professional' writer who views it as their job and source of income. If you want it to be your job, not just a hobby, then different standards apply. I'll use myself as an example. I went to journalism school, worked as a journalist, got paid for my writing and found that I hated pretty much every non-writing aspect of the job. I just couldn't do it. It wasn't my thing. So I write on the side now, as a hobby, and do something else for my bread and butter. I do have a few pet projects I may put out there someday, but I would absolutely do it through alternative channels because I know that the publishing 'industry' is not my thing.

If on the other hand you view this as a job and a business and the books are the product you are selling, then I think there is an expectation on the customer's part that they will get a quality product. I know the odd typo happens, and that's fine. I know there are things only a professional editor might catch. My original post was not about that. It was about stuff that an average person giving them book a one-time read through should catch, and can you honestly tell me you can't find one person---a spouse or family member, a friend, even a fan off your mailing list who would volunteer in exchange for a free copy of the book or something? Not one person who could so such a read-through and give the content one final check with eyes besides your own?

[starrigger]

Ficbot, I have same reaction you do to obvious errors. I was just reading the free edition of Free on my Sony, and thought, didn't anyone notice that there are paragraphs that start with lower-case "free"? The fault there is clearly either the publisher or Sony--hard to say which. I doubt very much that the copy-edited manuscript had that flaw.

That said, I'm not clear on what you're asking. Are you referring to someone looking at the copy that the writer sends to the publisher? Or the OCR of the scan of a backlist book? Or the ebook that shows up at FW or Baen or Amazon?

Different answers apply to the different cases.

[gandor62]

what is amusing is the fact that several publishers state that the reason for high priced ebooks is due to having to pay for proof readers and editors. Go figure.

[cstross]

Originally Posted by ficbot

This attitude bothers me. If you view your writing as a hobby and an art, fine. But then, don't expect to earn a living at it. If you expect to earn a living at it because it's a business, then just like any other job, there will be vital things you must do which you may not like. I am a teacher, I am good at it and that is my job. I dislike playground duty, am not good at it, and resent spending time on it when I could be doing teaching stuff, but it's part of the job so I do it. Every job has things like this.

To reiterate one more time, everyone seems to think I am expecting authors to proof-read for formatting mistakes in multiple e-versions. I am not not. I am expecting authors to proofread for CONTENT mistakes in the actual story, like Jimmy being called Jimmie and things like this. That is a very different thing, and imho that IS the author's 'job' certainly if he is charging people money for the book.

Actually? The content mistake you use as an example is a classic example of what the copy editor's job is for -- spotting bloopers that whizzed right past the author's eyeballs (because they look at the page and see what they're expecting to see, not what's actually there).

Just as looking for typos in the page is the job of the proofreader.

This isn't to say that professional authors don't do both jobs themselves -- but Torvald's Law applies to books as well as software: "with enough different pairs of eyeballs, all bugs are transparent".

Finally: I speak as one who earns a living by writing fiction. The only way to do this is to concentrate on the writing and -- assuming you're with a major publisher -- trust the professionals who take your manuscript and turn it into a book to do their job properly. Otherwise there aren't enough hours in the day ...

[ChaosInc]

Some smart authors have people helping them get the books done for e-publishing, and that does cut down on mistakes. It might not get rid of all of them, but you should have a readable book. Not even paper books are without mistakes, as I found several that went through all the proofing/gallery work, that a regular published book goes through before printing.

Starrigger is right that the rtf's that he sent in to the publishers was as correct as they could be, I know, as I helped proofread them for him. Proofing is not easy to do and without the actual book and the rtf before me, I would not have been able to do so. Then he went through them also, I believe. They all had to be a certain type of font, a certain spacing, rules upon rules to let their 'converters' do the work when it was done. Some rules even I will say are silly, but they had to be that way.

Needless to say, in the formats that were converted from the retailers, mistakes crept in, or I might have missed something, Starrigger might have missed something else, but the books you get from F.W. or Baen, Mobi-P, or where ever you get them, are going to be the best we could do following their rules.

Word by word, line by line, sentence by sentence, break by break, you try sitting at your computer for 12-14 hours a day to proofread and fix an rtf, lets see how well you do... will you try it?

[Ea]

Originally Posted by morriss003

I will answer this as a guilty author. I just finished and uploaded "Sam's Winnings" to smashwords.com. Once the book had been formatted, I started reading the book to see if everything was ok. Wince, wince, and wince again. All I can say in my defense, is that I read the book, while looking for mistakes, several times. Yet, once it was uploaded, I found several more. Reupload. I have noticed that once a book is in a different font, or size, I find many of the mistakes that I miss on the first several readings. This has to be a vision thing. The brain is wired this way. I suppose that is why having an editor is nice. Someone with a different vision thing.

As Harry states, it's really best to have someone else proof-read - but of course that is not always possible.

As you noticed, changing format helps a lot, espcially such a dramatic format change as printing out. Leaving it for a while, months if possible, also helps to trick your brain into believing it's "new". As the writer of the text, your brain know it too well.

Originally Posted by Sparrow

I'd welcome any tips on proofreading from the experts here.
I'm correcting a text version of a PDF scan at the moment, so loads of errors to spot.
Setting the font to Courier New is helping, because I find individual letters are easier to discern with a monospace font.
Each time I spot a typo I do a global 'search and replace' to correct all occurrences (checking each one before amending).
Afterwards I'll do searches for spaces where they shouldn't be, a spell check run, search for common mistakes (e.g. 'hut' instead of 'but') etc.

But that's pretty basic stuff - anyone know any more sophisticated tips?

I'll be listening in - I could use some tips, too. Using a mono-space font sounds like a good idea. I don't scan a lot, as proofreading is so time consuming (and my OCR software is a free version that can't 'learn' - and that excludes Danish books, too, as it simply can't deal with æ, ø and å).

On Mac I can do a search and replace of line breaks, so I can remove them - but I haven't been able to find a metod that works in Windows. I remember an article on Lifehacker I read years ago, about reformatting Project Gutenberg books, but I couldn't get any of the suggested methods to work.

Originally Posted by HarryT

Really the only way to "properly" proof-read is to have the eBook and the original document side by side, and read them "in parallel", looking for discrepencies. It's very, very time-consuming, but if you want to do a first-rate job it's the only way.

The times I've done it, I had the scan of the page displayed in a picture viewer side by side with the text editing application. This works best if you have a large monitor or two monitors, of course, but I don't think it would be possible to properly proof-read a scanned text without consulting the original. Sometimes the OCR software mangles things so much it's uncomprehensible, or you just can't guess the right word.