The Sword and Laser discussion

Also a lot of spaces missing after periods. I've done some research and it seems the only answers are contacting Amazon customer service and if a updated edition of the book is or becomes available, they'll update your text file. Or they may give you a refund. Neither options seem very attractive.

Bitter Seeds on the Kindle has some issues like that. I've noticed problems with certain recurring words that makes me think it was put together by someone who was very careless with the Replace All function.

This is why I tend to grab samples before getting an eBook. Gives me a heads up on if there's an glaring formatting issues.

I think it was The Great Hunt (of the wheel of time books) that had some awful recurring mistakes in names of characters, like it was scanned using OCR and the correction was bad. Example, Tam became Tarm. I had to switch to the paper book because it was so annoying. The rest of the series seems all right though.

I believe all ebooks are scanned from the printed copy using OCR, and rewrapped, hence the typos and extra spaces. I don't know why ebooks don't look better. They are almost the same as html + css (including embedded fonts) inside a zip file (at least an unprotected epub is). It's like publishers don't want you to buy them.

Iain M Banks's Surface Detail is full of typos and bad formatting. No-one had obviously looked at it after it had been OCR'd.

I've heard OCR mentioned, but nothing official. Do we know for sure this is happening. I guess it's a publisher by publisher instance. But what I don't understand, that why is OCR being used at all? Why aren't they using the text that was fed into the page layout program, or whatever application they use when printing a book? To save costs? Speed? Laziness? As Ron Burgandy would say, this all seems pretty "bush league."

I'd like to see if I can get some discussion and answers on the major Kinde blogs, and possibly even some pressure on publishers.

Bill wrote: "I've heard OCR mentioned, but nothing official. Do we know for sure this is happening. I guess it's a publisher by publisher instance. But what I don't understand, that why is OCR being used at all..."

I'd imagine older books (like the Wheel of Time series) probably use OCR to do the conversion due to lack of a straight text source for these books. Which explains the Tarm/Tam situation I was talking about earlier.

I'd take a guess that new books are probably eBooked straight from the source and typos should theoretically be the same as any that appear in the printed version. Which doesn't explain things like Surface Detail, but...who knows what crazy things publishers are doing?

Adrian wrote: "I haven't encountered that many errors in my ebooks, not any more than in my paper books at least. Now that I've said that though, I can pretty much guarantee I will start encountering them more of..."

In the last couple decades, even before ebooks, publishers have gotten really sloppy with proofreading. I hardly see a hardback book anymore that doesn't have some glaringly obvious mistake that could've been caught by a spellchecker. I've heard author say that this is due to cost-cutting by publishers.

The problem I have with ebooks is the formatting. I keep finding books that have paragraph breaks in the middle of sentences, no spaces after periods, or weird OCR errors where one word is raised up half a line (I remember a bunch of those in The Princess Bride).

I'm of two minds about the typos and other formatting issues in ebooks.

If I'm really into the book, I don't even notice the issues. It may register on some subconscious level, but it doesn't bother me enough to really note it.

On the other hand, if I'm having problems getting into a book, these types of issues can be a deal-breaker. They jar me out of an already unpleasant experience and sometimes, I just give up.

Most of the typos I see are in older books. Most of the new ones don't hardly have any. Don't know if it's because their better at proofreading it, because it's new. Or if the publishers have gotten smart and pull the ebook version from an electronic version done to setup the layout. Would make sense for them to have an e-version for their records, and to send to the printers.

I grew up on ebooks pulling pirated copies off usenet channels. As the market developed I started buying them legally, especially as the availability grew. Pirated copies were filled with typos as they were typically kids scanning them in at home. A small period space error is a huge step up from what i used to read so while they stand out glaringly, I rarely care. I care more about authors who use wrong verb tenses or leave entire words out of a sentence.

Fyi, the kindle app on the ipad lets you drag free mobi files to it now in itunes.