Over the years I’ve scanned and OCR’ed many printed books into electronic form for Gutenberg Australia—most of the Edgar Wallace collection there is my work, for instance—and during that time it’s become clear that not all typos are equal. After awhile, in fact, it became possible for me to divide typos into categories, as follows: Category 1: Typos due to English orthography Some letter sequences in English serif text happen to resemble others. The sequence ‘of her’, for instance, looks very much like ‘other’, and ‘thing’ looks very much like ‘tiling’. Every second or third book I scanned had these mistakes in it...

English teachers and other grammarians have long complained about the prevalence of texting abbreviations causing a corruption in the grammar of our youth. But I think there may be a more pressing new-media threat to proper grammar: desktop publishing. Think about it. In the old days, when you wanted to put a “No admittance” or “Authorized personnel only” sign up, you had to pay a fairly large sum of money to have it fabricated. When you were paying that much money, and getting a permanent artifact in return, you (and the artifact makers) would make damned sure that everything...

Some self-publishing authors just have way-too-thin skin. Melville House Publishing’s “Moby Lives” blog and Salon Magazine report on Amazon self-publishing writer Jacqueline Howett who took offense to an otherwise positive review calling into question her spelling and grammar talents—to the tune of inciting and taking part in a 400-post flamewar, which eventually led to a rash of readers posting one-star reviews of the book in question. It doesn’t seem to be very professional behavior—but on the other hand, it’s resulted in her book getting blogged about in a number of high-profile sites, and undoubtedly many people who would otherwise...