... But can we please go back to the time when we used to bother to line-edit fiction and popular nonfiction books before we published them?
I've been reading more on my Kindle lately due to various business trips and also impulse purchases of things I MUST READ at like 3 in the morning on a Saturday (cause that's how I party, ladies and gentlemen. Booyah). And I've noticed this in at least 3 of the 5 e-books I bought in the last month (and one of the ones that did not suffer from this malady was self-published, so I cannot attribute its cleanly success to any copy-editors anyway):
TYPOS GALORE. ALL OVER THE DAMN PLACE.
I understand that occasionally you, your agent, your editor and your copy-editor miss something here or there. A misspelled word, some misplaced punctuation. But I read A LOT (could you tell?), and I never before remembered seeing typos this frequently. I'm talking at least every couple of pages: cut-off sentences that clearly aren't supposed to be cut off. Misspellings. Random apostrophes in places they shouldn't be. NAMES OF CHARACTERS MISSPELLED.
I don't blame the authors. Writers can't catch every tiny nit-picky problem, especially in their own work. Plus some of these clearly weren't even the writers' fault to begin with (like weird-ass Kindle formatting that adds a few ^&#^@%$s every time there's an em-dash, or sentences that mysteriously vanish between pages).
At some point, I want to go to a bookstore and compare the print versions to these e-versions. Are people being as lazy with books they're paying to print and stock on store shelves? Or does only the e-version get treated like an uncopyrighted DVD shoved in some fake holders and sold on the Chinatown street corner for a dollar?
INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW.
I'm not against e-books. Yes, they occasionally weird me out, like they do most hardcore book lovers. But obviously, I own a Kindle. I purchase e-books. I'm fine with their existence, and if they get more people reading, hey, awesome.
But as someone who gets extremely distracted by typos (you know the note-taking function on Kindle? Yeah, I have used that to notate grammatical problems when I get really annoyed...), this shit is ruining my reading experience. If the publisher isn't willing to take their own book seriously, why should I?
So please, for the love of Grammar-Nazis everywhere, COPY-EDIT YOUR BOOKS.
This has been a public service announcement brought to you by OCD readers, inc. Now back to your regularly scheduled non-ranty programming. Somewhere else, obviously. Because I am all about le ranting. <3
I've noticed the same thing in a couple of books I've read recently (one print and one eBook).
ReplyDeleteIn my job, I get a little insight about eBooks and from what I understand, the same files that are used in the print version are used in the eBook version...so that makes me think the typos could be in both places.
What bugs me is when formatting gets messed up on eBooks. The last eBook I read (GONE GIRL) was purchased on my iPhone using the iBooks app, and the app kept screwing up the formatting, especially during the cliff-hanger last few pages of each chapter! It got really frustrating and I will probably only buy eBooks on my Kindle from now on.
Sigh.
Yeah, that's what I gathered too (at least from our nonfiction titles). Though some of the formatting issues are unique to e-book-dom. But the typos... hmm. Maybe we're just getting lazy across the board. Grah!
ReplyDeleteA few of the ebooks I read are ARCs, so I'm hoping the typos are corrected by before final upload. I'm really hoping.
ReplyDeleteSelf-published ebooks I actually have sent authors emails detailing some of the mistakes and offering to re-review if they fix them. Some of them are so horribly though that I just one star and delete.
I enjoyed this post, Ellen, and I've noticed the same thing. I thought the typos had something to do with PDF OCR. Don't really know the process though.
ReplyDeleteI sometimes wonder what issues are due to formatting and what was just poor editing.
ReplyDeleteIn a recent book I read on my Kindle (that yes, I paid money for), there were multiple occasions where there was more than one speaker in the same paragraph. One instance of this might have been forgivable, and I would have chalked it up to some funky formatting. More than one is just sinful. I think God kills a kitten every time you forget to start a new paragraph for a new speaker.
Anything else that a basic spell-check should catch... *shakes head*