Comments on: Now online: E-book glitch wisdom, Random’s ePub progress, ePub Cybook news, other IDPF conf tidbits

By: Garson O'Toole

Garson O'Toole — Tue, 19 May 2009 09:30:12 +0000

Thanks to Bruce for volunteering at Distributed Proofreaders, an organization that provides an excellent example of crowdsourcing. I wish more publishers and authors would take advantage of myriad eyes by providing an easy way to report typos. The Kindle and other ebook readers could have a small link on each page or a drop-down menu to report typos and grammatical lacunas. This wireless feedback could help to achieve “five nines” (99.999%) or “six nines” of orthographic wholesomeness. Even this fine blog would benefit from a streamlined error-reporting procedure with a dedicated typo-flagging link. Roger Sperberg reports that “Liisa McCloy-Kelley spells her first name with two i’s.” That is a tricky spelling. Liisa illustrates the difficulty of removing typos with her own slide presentation. She quotes Jacob Weisberg of Slate, and she spells his name Jacob Weisburg [sic]. (Yes, I realize that my own comments have not yet achieved “one nine” reliability.)

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Tue, 19 May 2009 08:05:27 +0000

Roger, great catch! Fixed. The IDPF page misspelled Liisa M-K’s name, but, yes, the presentation does use “Liisa.” I’ll drop IDPF Exec Director Mike Smith a note so he, too, can spell the name right. Was LM-K’s mother a copy editor? Did she name her daughter in a way to justify CEs’ existence? Thanks. David

By: Bruce

Bruce — Tue, 19 May 2009 04:56:01 +0000

As a volunteer at Distributed Proofreaders, I can understand how hard it is to get rid of the last .5% errors. However, I’ve been waiting several weeks now for Harper Collins to fix the eReader version of Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote, all of the footnotes refer to the footnotes in the preface, rather than the actual footnotes for each chapter. That’s just sloppy conversion of the internal files used to generate the printed book to ebook.

By: Roger Sperberg

Roger Sperberg — Tue, 19 May 2009 04:24:16 +0000

Just a reminder — and given her work with ebooks at Random House for the last ten years, something you probably want to keep in mind — that Liisa McCloy-Kelley spells her first name with two i’s.