Typos in ebooks

[Michael J Hunt]

Susan,
I discovered, through trial and error, that strange changes to the middles, beginnings and endings of certain words follow after you use the 'Find' and 'Change to' button (or equivalent) in your programme. Particularly if the word you change and replace is a short one. A good for instance is if you change the name of a character from, say 'Tom' to 'Fred', any references to tomatos will appear as 'Fredatos', or, if you're writing a jungle story, 'tom-tom' to 'fred-fred', or sci-fi, 'atom' to 'afred', or a medical, from 'anatomical' to 'anafredical'. This can be both irritating and funny.

When I first saw it, it took me some time to realise what was happening, then it dawned; now I'm very cautious when I use the facility.

MJ

[susan_cassidy]

Originally Posted by Michael J Hunt

Susan,
I discovered, through trial and error, that strange changes to the middles, beginnings and endings of certain words follow after you use the 'Find' and 'Change to' button (or equivalent) in your programme.
MJ

I don't know what you are referring to. I'm talking about just reading a book on my Kindle. There is no "change to" function on a Kindle. If I disassemble the book back into HTML, I can see the words as originally included, not a function of the software. OCR software, when used to generate an ebook, is just a first step. You still have to proofread and correct. The publisher did not, in the book I was reading.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Michael J Hunt

Susan,
I discovered, through trial and error, that strange changes to the middles, beginnings and endings of certain words follow after you use the 'Find' and 'Change to' button (or equivalent) in your programme. Particularly if the word you change and replace is a short one. A good for instance is if you change the name of a character from, say 'Tom' to 'Fred', any references to tomatos will appear as 'Fredatos', or, if you're writing a jungle story, 'tom-tom' to 'fred-fred', or sci-fi, 'atom' to 'afred', or a medical, from 'anatomical' to 'anafredical'. This can be both irritating and funny.

When I first saw it, it took me some time to realise what was happening, then it dawned; now I'm very cautious when I use the facility.

MJ

In your example of Tom to Fred. There is a way around it. Use a case specific search for Tom (not the capitol T) and also search for a space around the word. That will catch most instanced of Tom and correctly replace them with Fred. Then just do a search/ manual replace for Tom (case specific again) without any spaces. That will get them all without making other words that use tom or Tom.

Also, there is regex that would get it right in a search/replace.

[Patricia29]

I have read three ebooks since getting my Sony ereader, it seems the older the book, the more errors there are.
The worst one so far is James Michener's book "Caravan", he'll becomes hell, she'll becomes shell and we'll becomes well, capital letters and hyphens are added to words where none should exist, and a lot of words are misspelled or misplaced. There is barely a page without an error and it greatly affects the joy of reading, I even had to go back several pages on more than one occasion just to make sense of a sentence.
I have tried to complain to Sony, both by phone and email, so far no satisfaction. How can someone who speaks English as a second language, understand a complaint involving grammatical errors??? (All he could suggest was that I download the book again, but what would that have achieved?)
I wonder if the authors, (their heirs) and or the publishers know what Sony et al are doing to their work. It is shoddy work at best and criminal at least. There is no excuse for bad editing and there is no way of getting your money back. Shame on Sony!!!

[JSWolf]

I purchased a Star Trek eBook from Kobo and it had no quotes or apostrophes. The publisher is Simon&Schuster.

All Kobo was able to do is refund my money.

[L.J. Sellers]

I haven't come across the lack of punctuation yet. That's unacceptable. Publishers need to hire professionals to format their books correctly before uploading. It's not that complicated. Some of the errors are the fault of the translation technology though.

I predict it will all improve in time. But the greater level of attention might drive e-book prices up too.
L.J.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by susan_cassidy

When they are too lazy to run spell-check, it really makes me mad.

It's worse when they run a lazy spell-check.

[Michael J Hunt]

Hi Susan,

Sorry about the misunderstanding. I was explaining how things can go awry in the production process and how strange changes can occur in the text. There's no excuse for a professional publisher of e-books to allow such errors to occur. When they do occur, it's simply the result of poor quality control and you should be entitled to a refund.

Jon, thanks for that explanation. I had no idea the problem could be avoided so easily. Pardon my ignorance, but what is 'regex'?

MJ

[bizzybody]

Regex = REGular EXpression. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

Also known as "the stuff that Yahoo, Google and other search engines do their best to ignore in order to maximize profits from sponsored hits and prevent the users from finding what they're looking for". ;P

If I had the $$$ to do it, I'd start a web search engine called lookstupid.com Why that? "Look, you stupid computer! Stop trying to out-think me and just search for EXACTLY what I entered!"

Search engines used to obey things like "quoted strings", where only hits were returned if the page contained EXACTLY what was between the quotes. Boolean operators like AND, NOT, NEAR were obeyed. These days they're typically completely ignored.

lookstupid.com would strictly obey them. I'd even have an IN-ORDER operator so if you know some of the words, perhaps from a book title or song lyric, but not the exact and complete thing, you could enter what you know with IN-ORDER and only hits with those words in that order, first to last, would be returned.

Search engine programmers all need tied to a chair and made to read a few dozen books on this stuff. :P

[bizzybody]

Typos. BAEN has them a-plenty.

I've read all of the free BAEN e-books they've released on the CD-ROMs included with some of their hardcovers. I'm pretty certain they've all had typos.

BAEN does eARCs (electronic Advance Reader Copies) and charges money for them. ARC buyers are supposed to do things like proofread and provide feedback to the author. Sometimes the eARC and the final version have significant changes from reader feedback, but usually not.

But still the typos persist.

One place where punctuation issues can creep in is when mixing Unicode and non-Unicode text encodings. For English text books, the Extended ASCII character set works just fine. It has all the punctuation required. The problem is some platforms (like Palm OS) don't natively support Unicode, and conversion programs don't have settings for converting from Unicode to E-ASCII punctuation characters.

Load an ASCII file into a program on a Unicode compliant platform and it'll display fine. go the other way (if it's possible without conversion) and depending on the reading software you may find all the Unicode characters replaced with boxes or empty spaces or *nothing*- with the text on either side jammed together, or the program will replace the Unicode character with the same numbered character from the systems native character set.

Do a conversion from a Unicode source to a format which doesn't support Unicode at all on any platform, and the foul-ups will appear on all platforms that file can be opened on.

One fix that usually takes care of this in HTML is saving as Filtered HTML in MS Word. That's the cleanest HTML one can get from MS Word.

Another is this little program. http://ratzmandious.110mb.com/files/UTFStripper.zip
Does exactly what it says on the tin. It takes a text file, looks for the UTF-8 codes that start with &# followed by three or four digits (the codes are all 4 digit but leading zeroes can be dropped) and replaces them with the ASCII equivalents.

What you're left with is technically still a UTF-8 Unicode compliant HTML file, but there's no Unicode in it and it will convert cleanly for platforms that don't have Unicode support. The file size will also shrink a bit due to replacing the 5 or 6 characters required to encode a single character with a real single character.

Were one so inclined, all the text of a UTF-8 encoded HTML file could be entered in those &#nnnn codes, but the file size would be about 5 times larger. Hmmm, that'd be somewhat simple to do a conversion program for, but it'd have to ignore HTML tags and whatever in the header must remain ASCII.

The problem is all the USA's fault for being the main originator of computer technology way back when, when early computer technical people never gave a thought to anyone using non-English languages on computers. That, and the original non-extended ASCII character set only using 7 bits, that resulted in the need for the BinHex file encoding format for Macintosh files due to early internet router computers being programmed to assume all the data passing through was plain English text, so we'll just set that first bit to zero on every outgoing byte, m'kay... saves 1/8th on bandwidth at 110 or 300 characters per second.

On behalf of The USA, I humbly apologize for that.

[bizzybody]

One more thing. If you're typo-phobic and grammatical and spelling errors make you want to scream... avoid craigslist.org That place is a 'showcase' for the worst you'll ever see in abuse of the English language. Cn't blm txtng fr it either. Craigslist was that bad before text messaging on cellphones, but it may have become worse since.

I'm a compulsive reader. Put text in front of my eyes, I read it. I don't just recognize a STOP sign, I *read* the word STOP, every time. That comes from being dyslexic. I learned to overcome it for reading and can read quite quickly, when I'm not tired. I waited to start the Harry Potter books until #7 was out, then read them all in two weeks. Not uncommon for me to blast through a 400+ page book in a single Friday night. "WTF? It's Six AM!" But writing always was a huge PITA, or pain in the hand, until personal computers. Hooray for the backspace key! I'm not a fast typist but unless I'm tired I'm mostly accurate. I do know instantly when I hit the wrong key, I know I'm tired when I hit the wrong key several times in a row and have to *think hard* to push down that @#%@% dyslexia and force my finger to the correct key. Then I go to bed. Same for when I'm reading and have to back up a bit and have read the same bit three or four times and still don't know what I've read and the book's fallen on the floor...

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by bizzybody

Typos. BAEN has them a-plenty.

I've read all of the free BAEN e-books they've released on the CD-ROMs included with some of their hardcovers. I'm pretty certain they've all had typos.

BAEN does eARCs (electronic Advance Reader Copies) and charges money for them. ARC buyers are supposed to do things like proofread and provide feedback to the author. Sometimes the eARC and the final version have significant changes from reader feedback, but usually not.

But still the typos persist.

Everyone has typos. But if you point them out (be specific!) to Arnold Bailey of Webscriptions, THEY GET FIXED!

eARCs are not for people to proofread and report typos. They're to get extra money out of people addicted to particular authors or series. You're not expect to provide feedback. Baen has professional editors who do that. The point of eARCs is that there hasn't been time yet between the author handing in the manuscript and the eARC appearing for the final copy editing to have been done.



As for unicode, the great tragedy of unicode is that they didn't work out the utf8 encoding first (& that we'd need more than 65535 characters). If they had done that, we'd never have had utf16 and utf32, and the horror of BOMs and surrogate pairs.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by Patricia29

I wonder if the authors, (their heirs) and or the publishers know what Sony et al are doing to their work. It is shoddy work at best and criminal at least. There is no excuse for bad editing and there is no way of getting your money back. Shame on Sony!!!

It's not Sony, its the publisher of the ebook. Sony is no more responsible for the errors than Barnes & Noble is for errors in pbooks that you buy at their stores. Unlike Amazon who converts ebook files to its own formats and thus can introduce errors, the files Sony sells are publisher provided.

[aagstn]

I'm really disappointed in how many scan errors are in the recent Rex Stout books from Random House. I just finished If Death Ever Slept and I think every time in the book the word him or his was used it came up as Ms and Mm. Very annoying. I have read most of the ones released so far and all have dozens of scan errors. They show as version 3.0 at the end so I guess they didn't do a very good job looking for errors on versions 1.0 and 2.0.

[Dellaster]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

eARCs are not for people to proofread and report typos. They're to get extra money out of people addicted to particular authors or series. You're not expect to provide feedback. Baen has professional editors who do that. The point of eARCs is that there hasn't been time yet between the author handing in the manuscript and the eARC appearing for the final copy editing to have been done.

Exactly. In fact their info page on eARCs states:

Please do not send in typos and errors, we know the eARC is unproofed and the author doesn't need to be inundated with "corrections".