{"id":17493,"date":"2012-10-27T11:32:00","date_gmt":"2012-10-27T16:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17493"},"modified":"2012-10-27T11:32:00","modified_gmt":"2012-10-27T16:32:00","slug":"in-praise-of-invisible-editors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/10\/27\/in-praise-of-invisible-editors\/","title":{"rendered":"In praise of (invisible) editors"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> there than in the printed versions:<\/p>\n

… 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 \u201csub\u201d). 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.<\/p>\n

What almost everyone who hasn\u2019t worked for a newspaper doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019t have subs online.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve 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\u2019re not perfect. And they won\u2019t help with grammar or the its\/it\u2019s thing, or \u201carc\u201d and \u201care\u201d.<\/p>\n

So this is the first reason that many ebooks are filled with mistakes and typos. Many are being written by those who don\u2019t know about the vital function of the sub and wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019t have a solution.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,28,15],"tags":[134],"class_list":["post-17493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media","category-technology","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4y9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17493"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17494,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17493\/revisions\/17494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}