Tim Worstall

Tim Worstall, Contributor

I write about business and technology.

Tech
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10/27/2012 @ 8:23AM |6,923 views

Why Are Ebooks Riddled With Typos?

That’s the question over on The Verge: why is an ebook ever riddled with typos? It’s an interesting point and one that must strike people as they stumble and stutter their way through something downloaded from Apple‘s iBooks or Amazon. The answer comes in two parts, each piece affecting a different part of the market. Both have the same root cause, which is that people just aren’t paying enough attention to the production process.

The first part is in the self-produced and published realm. This is where a goodly portion of ebooks come from, after all. And the reason for so many typos here is that almost no self-publishers are passing their work under the nose of an editor. Perhaps this distinction is easier if I use the English English words, editor and subeditor (or “sub”). An editor decides on what is going to be published, how stories are going to be tackled. A sub does the work that is lacking here. Correcting typos, making sure sentences are whole, perhaps rewriting the occasional line to make it flow.

What almost everyone who hasn’t worked for a newspaper doesn’t understand is that all of the copy in anything has been passed under such a nose. The subs rescue many of us from the its/it’s problems, dangling participles (not that I even know what that is) and so on. One of the things that everyone writing online has had to learn (or relearn!) is all of these rules. For we don’t have subs online.

We’ve all also had to learn (or relearn) that subbing your own writing is near impossible. The eye just skips over some of the things that a writer is prone to. Sure, spellcheckers help but they’re not perfect. And they won’t help with grammar or the its/it’s thing, or “arc” and “are”.

So this is the first reason that many ebooks are filled with mistakes and typos. Many are being written by those who don’t know about the vital function of the sub and wouldn’t afford one even if they did. And given that it is incredibly difficult to sub your own work this might well be a problem that doesn’t have a solution.

Then there’s the second point:

Though I’ve only had the Kindle for three weeks, I’ve noticed that the book I’ve been reading, Foucault’s Pendulum, has many typos. This isn’t an out-of-copyright, cheaply made book from a fly-by-night press. This is marketed and published as a 2007 edition of the 1988 book by Mariner, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin. Its list price is $15.95, and it costs $8.77 on Amazon. Many of the typos — the letter “c” in place of what should be an “e” — appear to be the casualties of a hasty OCRing of some actual text of the work. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a process of scanning a book and using software which recognizes the scanned words as words, rather than merely as images, converting the images into text files. Anyone who has ever used OCR software knows that the process is far from perfect and always demands a serious attention to detail in the copy editing phase, once scanning is done, because the software doesn’t “read” the text perfectly. This seems to be at least partially what is happening in my Kindle edition of Foucault’s Pendulum, and it’s unacceptable.

Unacceptable or not, that’s what someone has done. Simply OCR’d the printed text and not subbed it through again. This is a problem that has a solution: other than just insisting that all OCR’d text gets subbed. Time will take care of it in fact. The translation dates back to 1988 or so, maybe a year earlier. It’s most unlikely that they have the original software files for that translation. Or if they did that it’s in a format they can still read. Thus the OCR of course. But for new titles that come out in ebook form this problem shouldn’t occur. For all of the editing and subbing of the text will happen in software. And the ebook and the printed version will come from the same master copy of that subbed and perfect version. So new ebooks we would expect to be as free of (which isn’t entirely but nearly so) typos as printed books.

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  • doggerbank doggerbank 1 year ago

    Also, it seems that many spellcheck programs are clueless about context. (“He poured over the copy looking for typos…”)

  • Your answer does not speak to the issue of new books and why they have so many misplaced hyphens, incorrectly hyphenated words and spelling mistakes. I am speaking of books published in the last two years that were destined from the beginning to appear in HC/TP & Kindle editions. I am an avid Kindle reader and have been aware of this problem and your explanations for older books that have been converted or OCD’d.

  • Tim Worstall Tim Worstall, Contributor 1 year ago

    “He poured over the copy looking for typos”

    Quite right. That’s what I meant about the “are” and “arc” thing. A spellchecker is fine for finding the words you’ve spelt incorrectly. It’s pretty useless at finding the wrong word you’ve spelt correctly.

  • mac townsend mac townsend 1 year ago

    I have bought newly produced ebooks (just released in hardback and ebook) with a disappointing number of typos. So the premise that time will solve the problem is clearly unrequited love!

    I left the print production business some time ago, but I do suspect the root cause for this is bad software. Whether originating software (InDesign, etc) or conversion software (???) it is the software that is messing things up.

  • Royce Shupe Royce Shupe 1 year ago

    Silly. We find errors throughout print media, including Forbes. As it happens, I would rather someone self-publish a book with a few more errors than justify the existence of a bunch of middlemen on the pretense that they rewrite a few sentences “for flow” and catch a few dozen spelling errors per book.

  • jackbee jackbee 1 year ago

    Or it is a reflection of the poor standard of teaching English, and the increasingly popular view that grammar, spelling and the twins pronunciation and enunciation do not matter as long as you can get the meaning across.

    Not being able to read, write and speak correctly is used almost as a badge of honour by many to prove they are just “reglar sorta guys and gals” – Innit?

    Typo used to refer to a simple error in writing something, transposition of lettesr for example, now it is a cover word for semi-literate.

  • Mary Paddock Mary Paddock 1 year ago

    Folks, this is why the smart (low budget) writer seeks out the help of other writers aka beta readers. I have a bevy of them, thank goodness. But even those with professional editors occasionally produce mistakes.

    But we know that this isn’t just the indie writers. We’re seeing this (admittedly, not as widely) in newer work produced by publishing houses as well.

    PS. What Royce said. Also, let the market sort it out. If readers will learn to read the first few pages of an eBook before they publish it, they can “encourage” writers to be more careful through lack of sales.

  • Perhaps if we readers were able to get partial refunds when we find at least X number of mistakes in books, that would encourage publishers/writers to use copy editors, as they’re called in American English. (Full disclosure: I edit text for a living.) Many websites do use copy editors, but the vast majority seem not to. I recently couldn’t get past the first few paragraphs of a Forbes column because of the high number of truly appalling errors. Whatever the subject matter, it wasn’t worth continuing to slog through (and scream over) so many atrocious, careless mistakes.

    I agree with the poster who said that “typos” are now being used as a way to laugh off the semi-literate. It’s frightening that, with so many semi-literate people out there today, so many people in general are noticing the increasing number of errors in eBooks and on websites. If even semi-literate folks are noticing this trend, then it has to be extraordinarily rampant.

  • Mary Paddock Mary Paddock 1 year ago

    I cannot speak for all retailers but on Amazon you have seven days to return a book for a full refund if you’re unhappy with it.

    As per Forbes and its ilk, you’re reading here for free. Enough said, don’t you think?

  • Aside from the editor, professionally published books actually go through two additional people: the copy editor, and the proofreader. Most self-publishers don’t understand these functions at all, so they don’t bother to hire them, or expect the editor to do all three functions — a terrible idea, as noted above.

    Copy editors and proofreaders are the Quality Control division of any publishing enterprise. Skip your QC, and you get the Ford Pinto. There is a great reason that traditional publishers give less money to the authors: They’re paying a whole bunch of other people to make the authors look great.

    Also, proofreaders *must* be given the option to read and mark up paper galleys. That last round of errors is just much, much harder to catch on a screen — especially OCR-induced problems (the computerized optical confusion is precisely why these errors exist in the first place). Self-publishers or vanity presses seeking to save money are often unwilling to print and pay manuscript mailing costs for freelance proofreaders, who are working on small margins and may naturally be reluctant to absorb the costs and extra clerical time themselves. I worked with a manuscript where the publisher actually expected the proofreader to edit via “comments mode” on a PDF. Not only that, but to “save time,” the publisher had sent an earlier version of the text to the book designer that did not incorporate the book editor’s final changes — and then asked the proofreader to reconcile the two versions on proofs. To anyone involved in a professional process, this is obviously insane. The whole manuscript had to be redone, resulting in loss of time and money.
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