Spelling and grammar errors in e-publishing.

where are they coming from? are they print book in electronic format? are they e-pub only books? are they self published books?

i don't read many e-books but depending on the source of the book you could get an idea of the amount of resources were available... editing is a resource that costs money.

also, there was a reprint of a book i was reading and this specific edition was unreadable because it was riddled with typos. only this edition oddly enough. this was a print book. I'm not sure what goes on behind the scenes but apparently on good run doesn't guarantee all others will be good too.

I suggest you write to the publishers of said books and inform them of this issue. Weird characters can get into text through changes in format, but there should be some sort of proofreading stage in the publishers' process to catch these.

LOG said:

Maybe it's just me, but it seems that e-published books suffer from a higher degree of literary errors.
Sometimes it's just due to the formatting; I recently read a book where the formatting had caused multiple words to lose their spacing, surely unintentional.
Other times I just don't know what to make of it, again, another book I read recently held some strange grammatical inserts, particularly a point where an apostrophe had somehow become three question marks. That, and other numerous errors made me feel like I was reading an uncorrected proof, or at the very least not the final draft.

Are these sort of errors expected to be more common in E-publishing, or have I just hit a rash of poorly published books?

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Ah, so that's a print book being converted to electronic format. I notice that print to digital often has more transition inconsistencies than work prepared strictly for digital offering. YMMV.

I think errors are better exposed in ebook form than print.

I've noticed this, too. I'm reading an ebook now (originally published in print, but recently made available as an ebook), and there are two words in particular that, every time they appear in the book, have a space inserted in them. Obviously it's some sort of artifact of the digital conversion process.

The digitally printed versions of my novels all have "artifacts". I put this down to poor quality control on the part of the printing service. My publisher has used both Lulu.com and Amazon's printing service, and both seem to have issues with formats.

A reputable e-book publisher isn't going to allow through any more errors in grammar and such than any old-school publisher would. What you may be seeing is the end result of both self-published and author-mill books pouring out.

Kerry

I agree. Good epublishers have good editing. Bad epublisher don't. Print publishers sometimes release scanned books without having them proofed--which is a lazy shortcut/money grab.

KMTolan said:

A reputable e-book publisher isn't going to allow through any more errors in grammar and such than any old-school publisher would. What you may be seeing is the end result of both self-published and author-mill books pouring out.

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Sadly, this particular book was published by Tor, and I bought the ebook version from Borders online. So no, it's not just self-publishers and author-mills.

Recently, I've been preparing previously published print books from major houses for reissue with Aurora, and it's a colossal pain in the wazoo. HUGE pain. The formatting used for print wreaks havoc with e-files and you have to be very diligent to catch all those bizarre spaces and insertions. Not to mention the other errors the original proofers didn't catch--and I've caught more than a reasonable amount of spelling and punctuation errors.

Something else to consider, too--a lot of reissues (especially if the author is creating the files and uploading them to Amazon) are just scanned copies of the original print book. A lot of those things just don't translate, and unless the author is very meticulous they won't catch the mistakes until it's too late.