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Too many errors and typos in Kindle e-books
July 14, 2009 | 9:48 am
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By Joe Wikert
That’s what most content on my Kindle feels like today…cheap copies of the original. Quite a few books look like the print to e- conversion was done so haphazardly that nobody ever bothered to look at the finished product. As publishers we fret about the prospects of $9.99 price ceilings for ebooks and yet we treat that rapidly growing sector as a quick-and-dirty way to make an extra buck or two. Where’s the R&D, the investment in future platforms and products? Btw, Walt Shiel recently wrote a great blog post related to this called Kindle Errors and Typos.
Walt is right that many of the problems we see today are the result of corners being cut and the e-opportunity viewed as nothing more than a way to squeeze a few more dollars out of the investment we already made in the print product. That’s OK to a certain extent, but for some publishers that’s their entire e-strategy.
Here’s the fundamental problem I have with this: As long as customers view these products as cheap copies of the originals they’ll never even achieve the same value as the originals. So if that’s your strategy, get used to the $9.99 ceiling because it’s not going up.
Cleaning up the conversion process is important but it’s not going to change the $9.99 ceiling either. What’s really needed here is a fresh look at the way content is designed, acquired, developed and produced in the e-world. And as a visitor wisely commented recently elsewhere on my blog, this issue will become even more important as ebooks become a larger percentage of the overall book market. All that overhead and fixed costs found throughout large publishing houses simply can’t be supported if the industry switches to a $9.99 model.
Ebooks won’t become 50% of the market overnight, but the percentage is growing and isn’t likely to stop. There are a couple of options here. Publishers can get leaner and meaner as they adjust to the new model or they’ll choose to invest in the future and start building more compelling eproducts and eplatforms. The ultimate winners will attack both of those fronts.
Editor’s Note: the original can be found at Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog. – PB
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Comments:
It’s a shame about the typos when the proofed and formatted pirated ebooks actually look and read better than the legally purchased ebooks. I have several ebooks in my collection where I have purchased the legal version and yet read the pirated version because of the horrible typos, mismatched fonts, and poor formatting. The industry is certainly not endearing itself to e-readers…
Yes, I think it’s ironic that the books I enjoy most in terms of formatting and readability on my Sony are ones I’ve gotten for free from Feed Books — better than many purchased ones.
Maybe if Amazon didn’t take so much of the revenue, publishers and authors could afford to take more care in formatting.
Yes, but it’s also true that the typos that appear in many e-books also show up in the printed editions! Publishing houses just aren’t putting enough money into their editorial departments, and it shows. Has anyone seen a college level foreign language textbook lately? They’re riddled with errors!
Dan, I agree that there are too many typos in print editions, but the number of typos in Kindle books is sometimes just horrendous. It looks as if some books are simply scanned from print versions with OCR, with all the obvious problems (rn to m, etc) that that causes. I just don’t understand why they don’t do at least one round of proofing. I would do it for free if I wanted to read the book (it is much less irritating to find an error if you can then correct it), but I guess that would just help accelerate the demise of the professional copy editor.
I’ve seen many posts that mention Kindle books that are reasonably proofread for 2/3 of their length and then suddenly have lots of typos. I’ve had this experience myself. Any thoughts on why this would be?