How can publishers really suck so bad in formatting?

[Abecedary]

Originally Posted by JasonB

I finished reading that a little while ago. I didn't notice a small caps problem (I may have just missed it) but I did notice that there were a few places where it looked like there were supposed to be footnotes. (I.e. a superscripted asterisk after a sentence.) I know that Stephenson has used footnotes in some of his other books, particularly the Baroque Cycle, so I was suspicious that he actually had used footnotes in Anathem also - but that the electronic version was simply missing them altogether. (I don't know how footnotes - as opposed to endnotes - could be applied to an electronic book, but surely they should go somewhere rather than simply being absent altogether.)

On a related note, I've read several electronic books now that:

1. Have mis-spelled words. These don't even exist in the English language. And they are repeated. So, it's obvious that a physical book was scanned in and mistakes were generated via OCR software. But, after this was done, the result wasn't even run through a spell check!

2. French words with accents that use uppercase letters rather than lowercase. So, for instance, instead of é you get É.

Anathem didn't have any footnotes (I seem to remember seeing an interview with Stephenson where he comments on how he chose not to use footnotes for this book). But there were three "Calca" appendixes at the back of the book that were referenced. Unfortunately, I don't remember if they were linked or not.

Generally, footnotes (actually, more precisely endnotes) are linked from the text by pressing the enter/select/whatever button on the 505 (the one in the middle of the arrow disc), and then the footnote/endnote is usually linked back to the note-point (though not always). If it's not, you can just press left on the arrow disc to step back through your page-view history.

The book I'm reading right now (ePUB of the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) has plenty of footnotes that are properly linked, and also uses a lot of accented characters that display correctly on the 505 (both with the default and a substituted font). If you're running into issues of the accented characters being capped, that's an authoring issue. They specified the wrong character in the text.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by llasram

But I think we can agree that less attention is paid to e-book editions. I've been think about this, and I think there are three problems:

• Especially for older books, publishers do not always have on hand digital copies of the final, fully edited text used to typeset the print edition.

Also worth noting: "Older books," in this context, means "anything published more than 10 years ago, when personal computers started to become very common."

Anything written before Windows 98 was likely created in a digital format that no longer is readable, if it was retained at all. While authors may have digital copies of the work they submitted, they're not likely to have a digital copy of the final, edited-and-proofed, layed-out-for-printing version. And neither are publishers... they printed it, finished the run, and scrapped the in-process pieces.

This is changing now, but ten years ago, a PC with a 10gb hard drive was smokin'; people didn't keep files they no longer saw a need for.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

This is changing now, but ten years ago, a PC with a 10gb hard drive was smokin'; people didn't keep files they no longer saw a need for.

I'm not sure that's it. By 10 years ago I'd be surprised if the overwhelming majority of the editors and authors didn't work with the text primarily on a computer. I think issue is whether the publisher has a canonical digital copy of the text in an easily-convertable form (not some sort of final typeset page-masters or something), which probably many of them saw little reason to keep perhaps even now, let alone 10 years ago.

[Abecedary]

For books over ~15-20 years old, I'm sure most publishers only have either the printing plates, or material that can be used to remake the plates, which is why they've resorted to OCRing the books. Also, in the past many publishers used proprietary computer editing/proofing/typesetting systems (some still do), so it's not like they can just throw the digital files they do have into a conversion program. In which case, again, OCRing might be the easier solution.