A recent article in The Guardian highlighted an embarrassing typo in a romance novel:
When she spotted me, she flung her anus high in the air and kept them up until she reached me.
Yes, that “anus” was meant to be “arms,” but the OCR software used in the book make a little mistake. This was spotted on Google Books, so it’s not even a question of cheap OCR software. It is, however, a scan that has not been proofread.
Over the years, reading ebooks, I’ve seen a huge number of typos, and it’s getting annoying. I can understand an un-proofread book, such as the Google Books example, but when a mainstream publisher sells an ebook with lots of typos, they should be held responsible. I’ve recently been reading William Trevor’s Collected Stories (only available in Kindle format from Amazon UK apparently), and I’m appalled at the number of typos in the book. There are a few in each story; and there are a lot of stories in that book, which is some 1,200 pages in the print edition.
I’ve seen worse. I bought a Stephen King book that was missing nearly 100 pages. And I’ve seen terrible formatting in ebooks. All of these examples show that publishers don’t pay much attention to the ebooks they sell.
As an author, I’m familiar with the law of the conservation of typographical errors. When correcting proofs, every typo that you remove is replaced by another one to maintain balance in the universe. But I don’t think any of my books have had more than a few typos. Seeing the number of typos – or, more correctly, scanos – in these books shows that there’s no serious proofreading going on after the books are scanned.
I note, however, that the William Trevor book is published by Penguin, the same company whose edition of James Joyce’s Dubliners had such bad formatting. I’m not sure if it’s endemic at Penguin, but they’d do well to take a look at their production process.
You can report typos from a Kindle, but I don’t know if anything ever happens after you do. I think that we readers should contact the sellers of these ebooks and ask for refunds if there are more than a handful of typos. Only then will publisher (perhaps) start taking such things seriously.