Some perspective on why ebooks are so filled with errors.

[RDaneel54]

The bottom line is e-books are not up to snuff and the publishers know it.

Why don't they correct the problem?

1. Apathy?
2. Incompetence?
3. Evil plan to discourage customers to read e-books and return to the properly formatted, gorgeous DTB pages?

Who knows? But they obviously have little to no concern about producing a top quality product for e-book readers.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by elcreative

What a bunch of extremely clever people... how come you're not all producing perfectly proofed, edited and beautifully laid out books if it's so easy...

It's not that difficult, you just need a bit of pride in what you do.

[EowynCarter]

What a bunch of extremely clever people... how come you're not all producing perfectly proofed, edited and beautifully laid out books if it's so easy...

It's thier jobs... They can proofread p-books good enough, why not e-books ?

[Serpentine]

Originally Posted by elcreative

What a bunch of extremely clever people... how come you're not all producing perfectly proofed, edited and beautifully laid out books if it's so easy...

Publishers outsource the conversion - especially for back catalogs - to rather lazy folk that work for near minimum wage often. Batch scripts and paperback scans are part of the work, do you really think they're going to bother doing any proofing on formatting retention? ofc not, it's not like they'll ever hear feedback or suffer in any way.

If you're sitting and formatting a book in your own time, you can easily do a better job without trying. But for the 3 hours of work it'd cost somewhere around $120 per super simple novel... or $5 if they just don't and use bulk deals.

Don't really understand why you're trying to protect a bunch of bad practices, but I guess corporate greed needs someone to justify it

[Todd Young]

It's simply laziness, or an attempt to draw people away from ebooks. Considering the fact that the ebook costs nothing to produce, they ought to be able to reproof the original word document.

[elcreative]

Originally Posted by Serpentine

Publishers outsource the conversion - especially for back catalogs - to rather lazy folk that work for near minimum wage often. Batch scripts and paperback scans are part of the work, do you really think they're going to bother doing any proofing on formatting retention? ofc not, it's not like they'll ever hear feedback or suffer in any way.

If you're sitting and formatting a book in your own time, you can easily do a better job without trying. But for the 3 hours of work it'd cost somewhere around $120 per super simple novel... or $5 if they just don't and use bulk deals.

Don't really understand why you're trying to protect a bunch of bad practices, but I guess corporate greed needs someone to justify it

Trying to make a very simple point... it takes time, money and people to do it... you can't magically conjure up a large increase in the number of people capable of doing good proofing let alone editing and those that exist have plenty of work to do so everybody wants cheap ebooks and all backlists made available without paying for the work and with trained people that don't exist. It's not a matter of protecting bad practices,just a matter of realism but all of the "experts" on proofing etc seem to forget that these things don't just happen... and certainly not for free though, of course, ebooks don't cost anything...

[jupstin]

Are you saying that publishers would hire more editors to produce acceptable ebooks if only there were qualified people available for the job?

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by elcreative

What a bunch of extremely clever people... how come you're not all producing perfectly proofed, edited and beautifully laid out books if it's so easy...

Quexos and RainingLemur have always known better regarding production than those who do it and howyoudoin is obviously reading a different article when he's talking about "OCR," where did that creep in...

As resident experts, let me know when your perfect publishing enterprises get off the ground and we can all bow down in awe and admiration...

The work produced by PGDP, where I have been involved, is far better than some commercially available eBooks. There is a difference between perfection and just clearly not giving a damn.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But how do we get a mess like with Snuff where a lot of the instances of people and couple were missing the leading space? The explanation of back and forthing a PDF doesn't explain this. Unless the PDF was used as the source and then errors are a free-for-all.

Were the words originally in italic or bold?
I've seen OCR conversion issues when spaces are lost when those tags are stripped out.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by elcreative

Trying to make a very simple point... it takes time, money and people to do it... you can't magically conjure up a large increase in the number of people capable of doing good proofing let alone editing and those that exist have plenty of work to do so everybody wants cheap ebooks and all backlists made available without paying for the work and with trained people that don't exist. It's not a matter of protecting bad practices,just a matter of realism but all of the "experts" on proofing etc seem to forget that these things don't just happen... and certainly not for free though, of course, ebooks don't cost anything...

Yes it costs money.
It costs money to proofread paper books as well.
Would you consider it acceptable for paper books to be sold with these sorts of errors in?
Why should we pay for a shoddy job? If we were getting them without paying, we would probably have more tolerance for the errors, but when ebooks are sold at similar prices to paper books, but with much lower quality, why shouldn't people complain?
We keep being told that most of the costs of producing a paper book also apply to producing an eBook. So where is money for editing and proofreading going?

[Kevin8or]

If I ran a publishing house and had to go back to the author's original word file for the e-book version, I'd outsource the file to a low-wage proof-reader or two. They send back their corrections. Someone in-house makes the changes to the master document. It doesn't have to be an expensive process. Far less expensive than the process for paper books, as described in the OP's article.

[Keryl Raist]

Originally Posted by elcreative

Trying to make a very simple point... it takes time, money and people to do it... you can't magically conjure up a large increase in the number of people capable of doing good proofing let alone editing and those that exist have plenty of work to do so everybody wants cheap ebooks and all backlists made available without paying for the work and with trained people that don't exist. It's not a matter of protecting bad practices,just a matter of realism but all of the "experts" on proofing etc seem to forget that these things don't just happen... and certainly not for free though, of course, ebooks don't cost anything...

Of course it costs money, but here's the thing, compared to what it costs to produce pbooks, it's a minor amount.

Look, I know first hand what it costs to have a 250k novel proofread. For me it ran about $2,500.00, and I don't have the cost savings of in house editors or piles of English Lit grad students begging to get a toe in the door at a publishing company.

Now, want to guess how much it costs to have 1000 copies of that novel printed and distributed? How about 10,000? Compared to that, getting it properly proofed it chicken feed. And, not to put too fine a point on it, if you actually get it properly proofed, you're a whole lot more likely to sell 10,000 copies.

I don't care who you are or how many people are clamoring for an electronic copy of the book yesterday, take the extra three weeks and get it properly proofed.

[J. Strnad]

The key words are "caring" and "pride."

As long as publishers consider ebooks to be parasites that rob them of profit, they will put a minimal effort into creating good ebooks.

As they learn that ebooks are the future of publishing, their attitude will change.

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by JDK1962

From the Gutenberg folks, I can accept a lower standard. But for people whose job it is to produce "perfectly proofed, edited and beautifully laid out books," and who charge top dollar, the standards are different.

As a sometime Distributed Proofreaders volunteer, I hope you're not seeing that sort of typos, and not at those rates in the PG texts from the last 5-8 years or so, especially when the text was contributed by DP. The DP books get looked at by about 7-8 pairs of eyes, and shouldn't have that sort of gross errors.

[SmokeAndMirrors]

This is just pathetic. The writer makes a valiant attempt to make the publishers not look quite so lazy and not-worth-their-salaries as they are, but it boils down to this:

The publishers don't care. They aren't doing their jobs, because they can afford to be egregiously lazy. With pBooks, they need to give people a good reason to not buy used. In the eBook world, they don't - for most people, they probably don't know about the world of ereading that exists outside the publishing houses (MobileReaders and other aficionados not withstanding) and don't know any better but to buy everything from them on Amazon and B&N.

So they gut you for 3 bucks more than the new paperback edition costs and 3 TIMES more than it would cost used, even though it cost pennies on the dollar for the ebook production vs. the paperback production, and they expect us to pay them these utterly insane prices even though they obviously aren't doing their jobs. I've never seen errors like this in a pBook.

Ebooks are badly edited (and at times, it seems, not edited at all) because the publishing houses quite simply don't care. They've set up a business model in the ebook world that could pretty much be called a scam, and at least for now, no one is really doing anything about it, so they just get lazier and lazier, jack their prices higher and higher, and for some reason people keep paying it.

My Project Gutenberg ebooks are actually probably better edited than much of the stuff I'm expected to pay $10 for (no way in hell - thank you, county library). And Project Gutenberg gives their books away. I'd love to see a publisher try to explain to me why I should pay them $10 for an ebook that looks like it was edited by my 7-year-old niece.