Quotulatiousness

October 27, 2012

In praise of (invisible) editors

Filed under: Books, Media, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:32

I don’t have a huge library of ebooks: partly because I’m still years behind in reading my actual printed book backlog, and partly because I’m not over-fond of reading books off a screen. However, I’ve often heard from those who do read some of their books in ebook format that typos are much more common there than in the printed versions:

… the reason for so many typos here is that almost no self-publishers are passing their work under the nose of an editor. Perhaps this distinction is easier if I use the English English words, editor and subeditor (or “sub”). An editor decides on what is going to be published, how stories are going to be tackled. A sub does the work that is lacking here. Correcting typos, making sure sentences are whole, perhaps rewriting the occasional line to make it flow.

What almost everyone who hasn’t worked for a newspaper doesn’t understand is that all of the copy in anything has been passed under such a nose. The subs rescue many of us from the its/it’s problems, dangling participles (not that I even know what that is) and so on. One of the things that everyone writing online has had to learn (or relearn!) is all of these rules. For we don’t have subs online.

We’ve all also had to learn (or relearn) that subbing your own writing is near impossible. The eye just skips over some of the things that a writer is prone to. Sure, spellcheckers help but they’re not perfect. And they won’t help with grammar or the its/it’s thing, or “arc” and “are”.

So this is the first reason that many ebooks are filled with mistakes and typos. Many are being written by those who don’t know about the vital function of the sub and wouldn’t afford one even if they did. And given that it is incredibly difficult to sub your own work this might well be a problem that doesn’t have a solution.

2 Comments

  1. I would rather live with some typos and pay 99 cents for light entertainment then a perfect product that costs $8.99. I don’t know what most of the authors get paid for their labour, but I would imagine that it isn’t a whole ton of cash and that is why many are turning to self publishing anyway.

    Comment by Dwayne — October 27, 2012 @ 14:03

  2. Living with some typos and getting the book cheaper is a fine trade-off, and I wouldn’t criticize anyone for making that choice. The problem appears to be that even the “big” publishers selling books for close to physical copy costs have worse quality control than they do for their printed versions (for books more than a few years old), because they’re using OCR scanning to convert the printed document to ebook format, and even good OCR makes mistakes.

    Comment by Nicholas — October 28, 2012 @ 10:19

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