Today, the good folk at Lifehacker posed the … erm, poser, in the title of this post.

As I responded on their site, I suspect we're finding ebook editions littered with typos, misspecllings and geographically different spellings because publishers are yet to integrate the production of ebooks with that of their dead tree books. Many just don't seem to be taking the ebook seriously – god knows why, given the experience of the music industry, and they're mismanagement of their product format change. I know you're probably sick of hearing me say that. Hell, I'm sick of typing it.

So rather than using a well-proofed, edited version of the text (used for the dead tree edition), they’re dashing ebooks out as an afterthought. Take it from me – my day job is as a sub-editor, so I proof/edit copy for a living – there's a lot that goes into getting copy to read "cleanly" and without errors of fact, spelling or punctuation.

Sadly it's an invisible industry – if you get it right and do your job well, the reader notices nothing. That's the point, jack!

But, rather than giving a job to a hard-working sub-editor, it looks to me like many publishers are getting an early manuscript file, running it through an automatic spellcheck/replace program, hitting "save" and flinging it out the door. Sometimes the text is so bad it looks like they're using OCR (optical character recognition) on the book's text after it's printed to convert it back to a digital file!

Ugn… ugn … I have absolutely no clue why this would be the case! They have to have the edited digital file with which to print the paper book! Argh! Blood … pressure … climbing…

Anyway, vote with your feet, ebookers – fling your money at publishers who deliver quality, if you have a choice.

 

Here goeth the Lifehacker article – about another poor quality ebook version.

As well as being handy and portable for consumers, e-books should be easy for publishers to produce: after all, there’s no physical copies to worry about. However, it seems that in some cases, major errors are being introduced in the process of e-book production.

The MacOldie blog discusses how a recently-published e-book edition of Ruth Rendell’s The Monster In The Box is absolutely littered with typos and mistakes. While Rendell is a UK author, meaning some spellings are likely to get changed in the production of a US edition, that seems no excuse for the litany of errors found in the Kindle version:

A keen US Rendell fan might be tempted to pay a visit to some of the locations mentioned in the book. Arrival at Stinted Airport (Stansted) is essential, followed by a visit to the nearby and much-oppressed town of Taxed (Thaxted). Further afield, he might be tempted to visit New Quay or Dollish (Dawlish), Lime Regis (Lyme Regis), or Sutton Cold Field (Sutton Coldfield), one of the pushest (poshest) parts of Birmingham. While in London, a visit to Wands Worth or Kingsbury, NEW (NW9) could be worthwhile. For transport, he could use a German car such as a VOW or a Mercy and should certainly remember to park close to the kern at all times

In an ideal world, producing an e-book should require little more than slight reprocessing of existing digital files, but that’s clearly not what’s happened here. Have you encountered similar problems in your own e-book adventures? Tell all in the comments.

Random House of Horrors: another disgusting ebook [MacOldie]