Badly proofed e-books

[wayspooled]

Originally Posted by HarryT

This is precisely why many of us who upload books here spend some many hours proof-reading them.

Yeah, and that is exactly why I've downloaded so many of my favorite classics from MB, replacing those I've accumulated from Gutenberg and even purchased back before I found this place. "Lovingly" formatted and uploaded by folks at MB is just the right phrase.

Not to disparage the efforts of folks that upload to Gutenberg because they're doing it largely to "save" books from disappearing and hallelujah to that. But it is very irritating to buy a book and find typo's and errors all through it. And in no way is that a published author's fault unless they're self-publishing.

In my opinion it comes from 3 things. 1) ebook stores just snagging stuff from Gutenberg or IA and sticking it up for sale without bothering to proof them. 2) ebook stores grabbing stuff off the darknet and offering it for sale without a licensing agreement with any publisher and doing it until they get caught and "notified" (and yes, I've just recently become aware of how often that happens). and 3) Just bad publishing by publishers pushed to cost cutting measures and not doing the right thing -their jobs-, hiring poor editors and proofreaders or skipping proofreading which is quite obviously going on.

[Abecedary]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

Is it the job of the editor to remove such things? You'll need a brilliant editor then, somebody who knows everything....

I would say this is absolutely the sort of thing a good editor should be on the lookout for. And they don't need to know everything--they just need to be able to know what kinds of things should be looked up and how to look them up (i.e., good research skills). OTOH, to expect that level of skill from an editor working on mass-produced genre fiction is stretching it a bit far...

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by starrigger

Jon, you're assuming the author has some choice in the matter, and that there's some kind of personal attention given to the books when they go through the conversion process. RTF is what they take, and it has to be formatted to fairly restrictive guidelines. There's a work flow at ereads, and after that there's a work flow at fictionwise and all the other shops. The problem is a combination of outdated mass-production conversion software, and too little attention to quality control at the retailers.

Also, what writer can afford to spend the time fine-tuning an html file for an ebook retailer? (And in truth, you can get perfectly good conversions from the RTF saved to compact html in Word. I tested my own files before they went in, and I got good ebooks. The problem was not in the files, it was in the conversion.)

And to put it in perspective, let's remember that it's a rare paper edition that doesn't come through with some typos, these days. Sometimes the typos are introduced during the final error-correction pass, as has happened to me.

Since your books are being sold without DRM, would it then not make sense for you to send in your conversions to the various different formats since you made good editions?

The other thing to do (If it was me) would be to try to find out just how this conversion process works to try to find where the weak link is since we know there is one.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by starrigger

Ficbot, to expect the author to fix this is like expecting Sisyphus to make it to the top of the hill. The system is simply not set up to enable authors to exert any quality control. (At least in my experience.)

It's not like they send us e-galleys, though you could argue that they should. But that's never going to work, when there are all these different formats, each requiring proofing.

Maybe if we ever shake down to one standard format, we'll have a system where the author actually gets to (and is expected to) proof the ebook.

What gets me though is given some of the errors I did find, how could they have gotten there? I've never seen Calibre do anything to actually change things in such a way. And the thing is, it didn't take much in the way of proofing to find some of the errors. Just a cursor glance through the book would have made someone aware of errors. Enough so to then have to go back and get things fixed.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What gets me though is given some of the errors I did find, how could they have gotten there? I've never seen Calibre do anything to actually change things in such a way. And the thing is, it didn't take much in the way of proofing to find some of the errors. Just a cursor glance through the book would have made someone aware of errors. Enough so to then have to go back and get things fixed.

I have. Do you remember the Diamonds in the Sky anthology?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

I have. Do you remember the Diamonds in the Sky anthology?

Never seen it or read it. What happened with it?

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Never seen it or read it. What happened with it?

That was the one where calibre was eating text after a pair of ">". You were the one who suggested the workaround I used to bypass the problem (I think).

[griffonwing]

With so many format programs, how hard would it be for an author to have his copy sent to a proofer, once it come back with a green light, to go ahead and convert his text to the different formats himself, instead of relying on Mystery Programs to botch it up.

He then uploads his completed formats to the publisher for distribution. Heck, the publisher makes the same money for less work, and if the publisher needs to include anything, he can send the author the required text for placing.

The publisher receives the final copy from the author, a cursory check to make sure everything that needs to be in the file is there, and done. Ready for purchase. In this way, any formatting/spelling errors rest on the author, not the publisher, and the author makes sure he sells the same text he uploaded, not a botched version.

[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.

The publishers and retailers have systems in place (good or bad), and they're not going to change their work-flow for every individual writer. And how many writers do you think are even remotely versed in ebook production (or want to be)?

[griffonwing]

Originally Posted by starrigger

The publishers and retailers have systems in place (good or bad), and they're not going to change their work-flow for every individual writer. And how many writers do you think are even remotely versed in ebook production (or want to be)?

It seems to me you have a publisher who is too lazy to proof a copy for sale. It matters not if it's a pbook or ebook, it's still for sale. It still reflects on the author MORESO than the publisher.

If I read a book, and the words are wrong, text is not formatted correctly, punctuation is off, words are misspelled, etc. I'm not gonna go "$#% publishers cant get this right", I'm gonna look at the book title, blame the author, and never pick up that author again.

If the publisher is not willing to treat you as an individual, I would look for another publisher. Either that, or self-publish your works on your own site. If you've sold enough books (as in different books, not multiple copies of each), then you've garnered enough of a fan base to successfully sell books from your own site.

It's that, or live with the lottery of how your ebook will eventually be sold.

[susan_cassidy]

Some ebooks have obviously not even had spell-check run on them. I've also seen lots of errors like spaces after commas, no spaces after periods, etc. where those combinations of characters should never happen. Publishers need a few parsing scripts to check for obvious problems. However, there is no substitute for someone reading the manuscript and paying attention. I've seen too many mis-transcribed names and misused words. Maybe they need a script that looks at all the commonly misused homonyms and other words and displays the context for a human to double-check? Like "flair" vs. "flare", "break" vs. "brake", "stake" vs. "steak", "loose" and "lose".

[starrigger]

(Biting back a snarky reply about the career advice...)

Look--many of the problems people complain about come from the retailer, not the author or the publisher. (Although I suppose you could argue that the retailer has become the secondary publisher, since they're doing the conversions.) Yeah, wrong words are probably a bad OCR job or maybe the author's fault, or the like. But formatting and spacing problems and run-together words and dropped scenebreaks, and a lot of things like that can come from bad conversion jobs. I'm not defending bad conversion scripts. They suck, and should be fixed.

But am I going to buy copies of all my books in every available format from all the retailers and proof them all? Get real. Life's too short.

Speaking of which, I should be writing my book, not endlessly commenting here...

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by susan_cassidy

Some ebooks have obviously not even had spell-check run on them. I've also seen lots of errors like spaces after commas, no spaces after periods, etc. where those combinations of characters should never happen.

Those can happen from the OCR program. Yes, they should run a few macros/scripts to clean them up.

1 hour per novel-length book should catch 90% of the small OCR errors, like weird line breaks, punctuation spacing issues, and the occasional paragraph that ends in a comma instead of a period because there was a dust speck on the page. It won't make for perfect files, but it'd get rid of the glaring errors that even the most casual readers will notice and be annoyed by.

Maybe they need a script that looks at all the commonly misused homonyms and other words and displays the context for a human to double-check? Like "flair" vs. "flare", "break" vs. "brake", "stake" vs. "steak", "loose" and "lose".

Those aren't generally problems in OCR'd ebook versions. Instead we get:
modern/modem switches (It was a shock to read about "modem birth control methods.")
burn/bum
corn/com
(etc.)

"die" instead of "the" (which is very hard to fix by search & replace, and spellcheck won't notice it... you spot it by looking for "diere.")

"hi" instead of "In."

Periods instead of commas in front of capitalized words or acronyms, because the OCR program is just smart enough to think a capitalized word is probably the start of a sentence.

Semicolons that should be commas but there was a dust speck on the page, or the comma was in an odd font that the program read as having two parts.

Hyphenations in mid-line. Hyphens instead of n-dashes or m-dashes.

[cstross]

Originally Posted by griffonwing

With so many format programs, how hard would it be for an author to have his copy sent to a proofer, once it come back with a green light, to go ahead and convert his text to the different formats himself.

1. If you're in my position, impossible for contractual reasons -- I don't own the ebook rights to my works (until they fall out of print and I serve a reversion letter on the publisher: happily, everything remains in print). They buy ebook rights -- this is a deal-breaker: no ebook rights, no sale -- and then they farm them out to someone else. I am simply not in the loop on the deal; I don't even get told when ebook rights are sold, or where, other than as a footnote to a royalty statement six months down the line.

2. Even if I own the rights to a book that's reverted ... back when I worked in technical publishing, we reckoned you could properly proofread about fifty pages per day, or one page per ten minutes. To do a 400 page novel, you're talking about eight days of billable time. Assuming you outsource to a sweatshop at $10/hour, that's about $800 in proofing costs. More realistically, think $2000-3000.

... Which is all very well, except that the hard truth is that ebook sales suck. Even Baen, who are Doing It Right, expect to sell about as many ebook copies of a novel as hardcovers -- and that's a new title. Reprints never sell as well as originals -- in fact, they typically sell 20-25% of the original print run. We're talking about 500-1500 sales, total. Where is the $2000-3000 for proofreading going to come from?

Writing -- and publishing -- is a business. A bit more awareness of this (or a little less sense of entitlement on the part of the consumers) would be welcome. KTHX BYE.

(Signed: Grumpy.)

Addendum Sorry about the grump. I read the preceding comments in annoying whine: "why don't the big bad authors wave their magic wands and make everything right?" To which the answer is: give us a magic wand and we'll wave it! And everyone can have a pony. Until then, it's hard work for little reward.

On the other hand, I'm hedging my bets against the rights reversion time, by making damned sure I have (and keep) archive quality copies of the final typeset text of my books (I reckon I am probably within the law to buy ebook copies, dumped to epub from the original Quark files, and crack the DRM if I am the copyright holder ) so that if I ever have to re-sell and go back to press I can at least avoid the OCR/eyeball step.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by griffonwing

If I read a book, and the words are wrong, text is not formatted correctly, punctuation is off, words are misspelled, etc. I'm not gonna go "$#% publishers cant get this right", I'm gonna look at the book title, blame the author, and never pick up that author again.

Unless you're buying directly from the author, you should be blaming the publisher for problems like that.

It's the publisher's job to edit the text and format it correctly.
It's the author's job (in fiction) to tell a story that people want to read.

Authors shouldn't try to be copy editors nor typesetters, nor their ebook equivalents. (Unless they enjoy the process.)

In general it's the publishers who are the problem in ebooks production at the moment.

Hopefully, when ePub (or successor) matures and becomes the standard format, and ebook devices become mainstream, and the volume picks up, publishers will start to expend the time on ebook formatting that's required.