LOTR ebook erratum and ebook quality

[Hellmark]

Originally Posted by John the Miner

OK, Hellmark, try this:
Let's assume you buy the books or continue to buy later instalments in the series, knowing full well there are (or there are likely to be, going on previous instances) mistakes galore in them.
Once bitten, twice shy? Or are you hoping against hope that this time will be different?

If the first book has issues, I will be gunshy to try again. However, it isn't always the case. The series I'm reading now, first three were done really well, and the fourth one has tons of issues. The issues have been reported, and I've not heard anything back from the publisher. This isn't the only series I've had issues with. I've read books from all of the main publishers now, and there is no real pattern to it. I can have several good books from the same publisher, and then get a really bad one (or a really bad few). It seems to be luck of the draw no matter what.

Originally Posted by John the Miner

So, you start to read and, if good fortune smiles on you, there are very few literals this time in the text and you can get down to having an enjoyable experience with your book, as it's supposed to be.
If, on the other hand, the pages are littered with mistakes, you have to interrupt your reading and/or enjoyment to do somebody else's work in correcting them for your own pleasure. After doing that, I suppose you go back to page 1 and start all over again to get the gist of the book.
Why should that be so? Does doing your own proofreading and wasting some time make the book more valuable to you as a finished product, knowing that the author or the OCR software didn't get it right in the first place?
There's a very good saying around: You can't polish a **** (I guess you've heard it? Starts with T, ends with D).
To my way of thinking, doing the author's job is pretty much a waste of time. It didn't help him or her produce a better book this time and there's no proof it will help him or her produce a better one next time.
If Joe Blows burst into print and his publishers put his work up for viewing/purchasing on their site, and you like the carefully chosen snippet or precis you see in the come-on, you probably expect the rest of the book to be the same ... and why shouldn't you?
Once upon a time, like all good fairy stories start off, there used to be a masthead on publications giving the author's details and contact particulars. Now you get a faceless publisher's company name, if that.
Does a letter of complaint sent to the publisher get passed along to Joe Blow?
Does Joe reply to you? Should he? Shouldn't he?
If he doesn't reply in person to your letter, at the very least, wouldn't it make good business sense for either or both to put up a disclaimer on the company's site saying "Sorry"?
Yair, right!
Oops! What's that? A flock of pigs just flew past my window ...

At this point, do I attempt to read despite the issues, or try to fix things as I go so I can have a good copy for when I reread it. Also, when certain errors are consistant (such as OCR mistaking the same word repeatedly), I can use a search function for finding repeats of the error, and quickly fix it based on the context so I can have a worry free first read.

Also, this goes beyond the author's job. It also lands at the responsibility of the editors and proof reader. If it is an OCR issue, then it is entirely out of the hands of the author, as most likely previous versions didn't have that problem and the author is no longer actively working with it.

[John the Miner]

Righto, let's agree to disagree.

[Giggleton]

People talking about an entitlement to "error" free books but complaining about others who ask for entitlement to the "books" themselves. Sounds like hypocrisy to me, if you don't like it fix it.

[John the Miner]

That's just it ... I don't buy 'em, so I have no need to "fix" anything.
If you don't like the erriors you come across, you fix 'em.
I don't demand error-free books when I read them. I've yet to see any decent-sized document that hasn't got a mistake or three in it.
Why, I can even make sense out of the blues in the public domain books without too much trouble, but I suppose 54 years working as a proofreader has inured me to anything a line of print can throw up at me.

[Hellmark]

Most of us don't expect books to be totally error free, but there are times when books we pay for have lots of errors. Book I am reading now has an odd quirk where every 10 pages or so, words get jumbled. A character talks about people getting yearly "hscreening ealth", and things of that nature. Not to mention the randomly placed question marks that pepper the pages.

I can figure out what is meant, it just bugs me that such glaring issues make it out the door, when publishers supposedly have numerous people working on making these books look good.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

Book I am reading now has an odd quirk where every 10 pages or so, words get jumbled. A character talks about people getting yearly "hscreening ealth", and things of that nature. Not to mention the randomly placed question marks that pepper the pages.

The kind of errors you describe sound very much like a faulty decryption of a mobipocket book, due to failure to handle trailing characters correctly. If you have removed the DRM from the ebook, do check the original DRMed copy.

If the original DRMed copy is OK, try removing the DRM again using the very latest tools available at Apprentice Alf's blog.

If the de-drmed copy still has faults that the original doesn't after using the latest tools, I suspect that the people at Apprentice Alf's blog would very much like to hear about it.

[Hellmark]

What if it is still DRM'ed epub from the library? Granted, I am only about 20 something pages in and so that may skew my "every 10 pages or so" figure, since it is a small sample size.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

What if it is still DRM'ed epub from the library? Granted, I am only about 20 something pages in and so that may skew my "every 10 pages or so" figure, since it is a small sample size.

If it's still DRMed and from the library, then it's a publisher's error.

[AprilHare]

I haven't given up searching for errors! I will report back when I get to the end however..

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by AprilHare

I haven't given up searching for errors! I will report back when I get to the end however..

There are LOTS of errors in the Appendices, as I recall. The only way to find those is to do what I did for the whole book, which is to read the eBook and the paper book is parallel, comparing them word for word.

[Quexos]

That would be extremely tedious. I think we should aim for the obvious errors like it has been done so far in this thread. I don't think there are too many left in the book.

Originally Posted by HarryT

There are LOTS of errors in the Appendices, as I recall. The only way to find those is to do what I did for the whole book, which is to read the eBook and the paper book is parallel, comparing them word for word.

[poohbear_nc]

Amazon just sent me an email today announcing the availability of a new version of LOTR (ASIN:B0026REBFK) - correcting typos & missing content issues - being offered to those who purchased earlier Kindle versions.

[Kali Yuga]

Yeah, I just got the same email. Apparently getting the new version will wipe your bookmarks and notes though.

The errors on p14 are fixed. It looks like I have to wait until it's indexed the book to do any searches for the rest.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

Amazon just sent me an email today announcing the availability of a new version of LOTR (ASIN:B0026REBFK) - correcting typos & missing content issues - being offered to those who purchased earlier Kindle versions.

Fictionwise haven't said anything to me, but on checking, I do now get a different version than the one I downloaded on 17th April. This is the all-in-one version.

Comparing the text, there have been many changes from the earlier version:

Since I had thought that the text had been in an electronic database for some time, I'm surprised to see that many of the changes are essentially of OCR errors: hypens erroneously removed at line ends, paragraphs incorrectly split or not split at page turns, accents missing or mistaken.

The latest version does seem to have fixed up LOTS and LOTS of errors though. Well over 450 affected paragraphs by my count.

The first few errors fixed, and categories of errors fixed throughout the book:

In the table of contents:
The PROLOGUE entry also has the text "Concerning Hobbits, and other matters"

In the NOTE ON THE TEXT:
A hyphen corrected to an en-dash in the paragraph about volume 3
A hyphen corrected to an en-dash in the paragraph about summer 1966
A hyphen corrected to an en-dash in the paragraph about the United States
A hyphen corrected to an en-dash in the paragraph about the 1984 British edition
Smeagol corrected to Sméagol in the paragraph about studying Tolkien's manuscripts
A hyphen corrected to an en-dash in the paragraph about interesting tidbits
É corrected to Éowyn; in the same paragraph
A hyphen corrected to an en-dash in the paragraph about significant achievement
A hyphen corrected to an en-dash in the paragraph about emendations
Drúeadan corrected to Drúadan in the same paragraph
An erroneous space removed from Númenórean(s) in the same paragraph

In the FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION
The corrected to Théoden in the paragraph starting "Those who had asked"
"Barad-dûen" corrected to "Barad-dûr would not have been" in the paragraph starting "The real war"
Missing paragraph break put in at "The Lord of the Rings is now issued"
"Núng" corrected to "Númenor and the arising" in the paragraph starting "At Great Smials"

Chapter 1:
A missing hyphen added back into "Good-bye"

Chapter 2:
A missing hyphen added back into "Hundred-weight"

Chapter 3:
sila lumenn correct to síla lúmenn on paragraph starting "O Fair Folk"

Chapter 5:
You'llget corrected to You'll get in paragraph starting "But you won't have any luck in the Old Forest"

etc., etc.,

THROUGHOUT:
Some erroneous spaces before footnote markers removed
Some more hyphens in date ranges changed to en-dashes
Some SMALL-CAPS now used instead of CAPS
Spaces removed from between adjacent single and double open quotes.
Some punctuation removed from inside italic sections.
Various paragraph breaks corrected.
Some missing punctuation (end quote marks) put back.
Several instances of an erroneous open single quote being replace by the correct apostrophe.
Many, many corrections to accents

Rather irritatingly, they have used a graphic for ū (lowercase u with a straight bar accent above it) when it is included in the Kindle default font.

Appendicies: About 3/4 of the changes are in the appendicies. Perhaps 300 out of the 450 or so changed paragraphs. Lots of tabes fixed up, so that dates are in the correct row, rather than being off by one or two rows.

We still have the rather odd index, with non-hyperlinked page numbers.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Appendicies: About 3/4 of the changes are in the appendicies. Perhaps 300 out of the 450 or so changed paragraphs. Lots of tabes fixed up, so that dates are in the correct row, rather than being off by one or two rows.

Yes, I mentioned above that, when I proof-read it myself, there were lots and lots of errors in the Appendices.