I am currently enjoying a novel by F. Paul Wilson entitled Black Wind (The Secret History of The World).
As I’m reading merrily along, noticing all the hyphenated words and misspellings, what do these tired old eyes see but this:"… who calls into question the great Mohammed’s place as Allah’s one true phosphate will fail."
You read that right, and I even looked it up to see if maybe it was an Arabic word, but no, phosphate is phosphate.
I’ve seen words misspelled and mispunctuated on my Kindle, but never misused.
Anyone ever seen this happen?
And, oh yeah. All the letters on the keyboard are rubbing off.
Depending on the source of the ebook in question there can be some fairly amusing through seriously annoying typos. Some ebooks seem to be created by scan/ocr without human proofreading going on.
I have found some pretty interesting screwups in most ebooks whether Gutenberg or from an actual publishing house. Baen seems to have the best proofreading right now.
Hadn’t noticed the paint coming off my keys, though I rarely use it, I load all my books in from the computer.
So prophet became phosphate because a humie may have been “asleep at the wheel”, huh?
I play Every Word on it quite often, so I don’t know if that could rub the letters off or not, but we bought that warranty, so we can just send it back for another one.
I’ve noticed serious (and regular) mistakes when reading the e-book versions of the Song of Ice and Fire series. Obviously this weren’t typed in manually and are only casually examined for mistakes- a computer scanning pages does the heavy lifting and there can be even more problems depending on the font the books use, etc.
I would work for minimum wage proofreading ebooks if any damned publisher would just give me the chance =( I worked doing data capture for a company that scanned and converted documents for archiving - Weyerhauser lawsuits, Grand Distilleries merger and a few others. They used a great program, the scanned image popped on the left, the OCR image on the right, and you could make corrections on the text on the right and enter keywords for the search engines. I would be willing to bet that it is a fairly commonly available program.
I would love to sit and proof etexts all day at home. Perfect job for me.
On retrospect, if I try, perhaps I could freelance offering etext proofreading, I would just have to get that type of program. I OCR correct my own stuff, but I usually do it a couple pages at a time using the hard copy book. It would be worlds easier to do the side by side. Might be a business opportunity…hmmmm:dubious:
I’ve noticed typos and other errors this egregious in dead-tree versions of popular books, so I suspect it’s not a Kindle-only problem, although the conversion to e-reader format may introduce yet more of these errors. I think it’s just one more consequence of the lack of proofreaders in the publishing business.
A bit off-topic to the OP but somewhat relevent:
I found that my Kindle 3 was never fully charging. I’d leave it plugged in overnight and still the battery meter would never fill but the green light would turn on. The battery’s life was quite short too. Maybe a week or two. I had to do a soft reset (hold the power switch over for thirty seconds then release and plug into the computer). Now my battery charges to its fullest. Pretty stupid design but glad it was a fixable issue.
Do you have one of the cases that Amazon makes without the light? They were, or are, having problems with the cases that causes the battery to discharge a lot faster. I was also having problems with my Kindle resetting every few days. I ended up calling Amazon and they know about the problem and will give you a new case with the light. I haven’t had a problem since.
Quasi you can ask F Paul Wilson yourself. He answers questions all the time. I really enjoy his books, and since they are really cheap on the Kindle, at least his older ones, they are a great deal.
I’m rather confused why new e-books have so many of these mistakes, like typos and such. I understand why older books have the errors - it’s my understanding that the e-book file for these is created by scanning the pages and then running OCR on them to extract the text. It’s often not a perfect conversion, no matter how good the OCR software, so I can easily understand why the resulting e-books contain errors.
But new books - why? Presumably these were in an electronic format at some point anyway, right? I mean, perhaps the author still delivers a printed manuscript for editing and what not, but there’s an electronic file somewhere, right? There has to be. And it’d be laughably easy to convert the electronic file to e-book format. So why are there still so many errors?
Or am I sadly misinformed about how books are transferred from author to publisher? (This is a distinct possibility.)
