Rant Alert!
Ebooks. Does anyone actually proof read them or test them on the devices they
will be read on before they are published? Doesn’t seem like it to me.
I read a lot.
Print books, usually, but I take an ereader when I’m holidaying or travelling
around. At the moment I’m doing a re-read of Robin Hobb’s early works and my
old print copies are so well-read and delicate now that I’m reading digital
copies on my Kindle.
I read a lot of
proofs so I am well tuned to expect errors in those – misspelt names, typos,
repeated words, formatting and line space issues – which I happily ignore,
confident they will be rectified before the final book is published. I even
sometimes spot errors in published books – it happens, and again I try to ignore
it and accept that mistakes can slip through the net. Look at the first edition
hard copies of The Republic of Thieves and
you will soon start to hate the word ‘storeys’
But in reading
Hobb’s books on the Kindle I’ve come across so many errors it is starting to
really annoy me, and I’m fairly confident these errors are not in the print
books and have solely come about as a result of the digital book process.
Character names
have occasional spaces in them as though a spellchecker has tried to make two
words out of them – Wintrow becomes Wint row. Several apostrophes have been
replaced with random symbols – @ & – which I presume has happened when the text
has been converted/formatted for digital reading. Sometimes the wrong word
entirely appears in a sentence – ‘do’ instead of ‘to’ – or an ‘n’ appears where
there clearly should be an ‘r’ followed by another letter.
If all of these
errors are so glaringly obvious to me, the reader, why on earth have they not
been rectified? Do ebooks really get no other treatment than to take the
existing text as is, run it through a converter and then wham bam publish ma’am?
No tests? No checks? No final proofread following conversion? Are people really
content to be putting what comes across as sloppy, mediocre work out into the world?
Maybe I’m being a
little harsh. We all make mistakes. But shouldn’t mistakes be occasional and genuine
rather than frequent and lazy? Please, for the sake of story-lovers everywhere,
to allow the very best of your work to get out there and show yourself in the
best possible light, proofread, and test your ebooks with the same beady eyed
diligence you would use for print.
Elloise Hopkins.
