It’s not necessarily the medium change that makes typos show out, as changing the position on the paper/screen. Just changing the margin on a document to move stuff around on the page can make it easier to find them.

Modern books that start out digital almost always have paper copies for proofing before the print version is released. And when you’re printing thousand of copies, you have to get it right. Ebooks typically don’t have a paper stage. I’m not even sure many of them get read on their target device. Easy digital publishing often means sloppy publishing.

Even a different digital format helps. I’ve been working on a book for months in Scrivener, so it should be clean. And yet yesterday, when I created an iPad version, typos began to appear.

Apple should do its users a favor and adapt iBooks Author’s handy Preview to iPad function to work inside almost any text app. Making it work via WiFi would be even nicer. And proofing would be so much nicer if it could be done away from a desk.

I have noticed, by the way, that some errors which I would miss on paper I often pick up on a screen; perhaps because there are fewer distractions in things like paper texture and individual variations in characters introduced by the printing process.