From a user review on Amazon:
While I enjoyed reading this on vacation, I must say I’m starting to see more and more typo’s in the Kindle versions of the books I buy. This one is full of them! Run on words (two or more words with no spacing), words being hyphenated that shouldn’t (Faw-cett) etc (lots of these type of errors).
From Amazon Customer discussions, reviewer Kerry Ellis writes:
They’re a bit distracting. It seems like they scanned the text in and it didn’t come out quite right; a typical example would be the word “dose” when it should be “close.” Also in a few places there are commas where there should be periods or vice versa, which meant I had to re-read because some sentences didn’t make sense the first time through. It’s too bad that buying such an expensive device means having to compromise on mistakes like this.
Edit: I feel bad about saying all that, because I am loving this book - minus the distractions. But I’ve found even more problems. Aside from parsing the text wrong so that letters become combined (as in close -> dose), and the period vs. comma confusion, here are some other mistakes I’ve found:
* Quotation marks being in the wrong places: The start of a quote will be fine, but where it should be a closing quotation mark, it will be printed as an opening quotation mark on the next section of text. An example would be:
“I’m going to the store. “She didn’t know if this statement was true…
Except picture that with the quotes actually being curvy, so that the second sentence really looks like a new quote. Luckily, this isn’t a problem for most of the book, as the author uses direct quotes sparingly.
* Spacing is all wrong. Where there should clearly be a blank line separating two ‘sections’ within a chapter, the next paragraph will begin on the very next line instead, left-justified and without indentation. This is annoying because it’s not immediately obvious that the narration is jumping from one point in time to another, in some cases. Often, the narrator (Iris) will be talking about present-day, then will launch into remembrance of something from the thirties. This can be hard to follow without the appropriate line breaks. The same is true for passages from other sources - for example, one chapter describes Laura and Iris’s education in poetry, and has a few excerpts from various poems. It was clear that the formatting should have been such that the poem excerpts were separated by blank lines before and after, yet they only appear before.
* Capitalized letters in the middle of a sentence. This one is self-explanatory. At least they’re not in the middle of a word.
* There are words that make it obvious that two letters have been morphed into one, such as close and dose. But there are also words that are clearly just…the wrong word, without any obvious letter-mashing. With context, you’ll likely be able to figure it out, but it’s still annoying to have all these disruptions in the flow of reading.
* Random Italics that don’t belong. Often a single word in a sentence will be in Italics; sometimes this is intended, but sometimes it’s obviously a word that shouldn’t be Italicized.
Lear This, Please
Dear eBook Producers:
Mechanized extraction of text from existing assets, which I have no doubt you’re using (in fact, you’d be fools not to), is a start to the process.
It is not the entire process, at least not if you want to retain customers.
On more than one occassion, books that I’ve purchased for my Kindle have had errors in them that, while rooted in OCR or transcription, ultimately represent a failure of quality control. Errors that would never be tolerated in physical books, and that make it clear that no person actually read the book on the device it was targeted toward before it was hustled into the market.
Which brings me to the exhibit above. How can I have any confidence in your product when nobody even caught the typo in the subtitle of the book?
