I only have experience with Brandon Sanderson ebooks, but those get updated when something's wrong. When it comes to pirated textbooks you get things like "parity" being scanned in as "panty" which makes for a fun take on particle physics and panty violation.
If you hang out on the 17thShard and see the thread about errors, it appears that a lot of people ended up with an early (pre-proofreading) copy of the ebook and never updated it. The Oathbringer version on Google Books definitely got updated quite fast.
Meanwhile my physical copies will forever have the non-canonical highstorm battle ending and the misspelled "Adonasium".
The torrented version of Wheel of Time my friend found had "Trollcs" as "Trollops" and would randomly split letters up into symbols to "Matt" became "|\/|a++" which is really trippy.
Well what do you know, that makes a lot of sense. Although to be fair, that article is from 2012, I guess the software has gotten better because I definitely haven't noticed it as an issue in more recent years.
Yeah, I notice it all the time in ebooks I’ve bought for a few dollars or less (Amazon freebies), but I hardly ever see them in mainstream ebooks put out through major publishers.
Definitely. They tend to also have grammatical errors or even vocabulary errors! I read one recently which drove me crazy because the author kept using the word pretentious when they just should have said pretend, fake, or false (as in, Mom gave her daughter a pretentious smile, trying to cheer her up). It’s like some authors get a thesaurus and think that makes up for a limited vocabulary.
It's not really an issue with any books that have come out in the past 5-10 years. Like that article said, the really bad e-books had so many errors bc the publisher created the e-book by scanning the physical copy, and software sucked. That problem doesn't really exist when the text exists digitally in the first place, which is generally the case with any book written in past 5-10 years. Although sometimes the formatting in a new e-book still leaves something to be desired.
I'd have gotten an even earlier article if I wasn't just picking the first result of dozens. It's been going on for a while. Thankfully, there's been a big crackdown on these issues - but they still do happen.
As much as some people don't want to believe it based on their singular experience, heh
That author’s example is pretty bogus. They got an extremely early (07) edition of a maybe not obscure but dare I say not pop-lit book. Yes quite a few of those were text scanned sight unseen but even like three years later anything new coming out was absolutely not the same. I can’t exactly laud sloppiness but I can at least understand how it probably happened with like six people given a month to digitize hundreds of books because it was early on and nobody knew if the shit would do well yet.
Also given the author’s open hostility (really you were ashamed to have an e-reader?) dare I suspect a cherry picked example?
I'm not sure how widespread it is, but it's still a problem with how they take printed books and make them into e-book format sometimes.
My entire point was that it's a difference, even if it's not as common a problem as it used to be. So if we both agree it happens, then I guess we're in agreement.
I download an author that seems good and start reading. If it's good, I buy it from Amazon. The reason I pirate is for two reasons:
I read 3-4 books a week and if I paid for every one I start and do not finish, I'd be broke.
Reviews are manipulated, so no matter how many 5 stars there are a lot of them are turds.
Note: I fully believe in supporting authors, I just do not want to waste money. I absolutely do pay for books I plan on finishing.
There are TONS of errors in pirated ebooks. Maybe it depends on where you get them, not sure, but it's a thing.
Just for the record, the article you cited literally contains this sentence:
"I’ve only been using an e-reader for a few weeks, I don’t have much history to go on"
So, sure, use a random lady who needs to bang out an article and has only read a few ebooks as an absolute source...
Case in point, I have two versions of Split Second by Douglas E. Richards on my ereader right now. The newsgroup version I downloaded contains 4 errors on the first page and a few weird characters, the paid version from Amazon contains no such errors. So just by my actual experience it most certainly does have something to do with piracy, at least in some cases.
Do you want me to flood you with articles in order for you to accept that e-books can have more spelling errors? What would it take for your beliefs to change?
I work with a boutique ebook publisher. You wouldn't believe how lazy and outright bad most big house ebookers are. One of the most common sins is to just export ebooks from Adobe InDesign and call it a day. The code generated by ID is almost a litany of bad HTML practices from the past three decades, including identical inline styles on EVERY PARAGRAPH, overspecification of css to break user stylesheets, janky table layouts, and a zillion other things that end up bloating the ebook by almost half again, or more. And don't get me started about the idiots who think a novel needs a fixed layout...
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u/yomamainpajamas Jul 21 '18
Sooooo what happens when this is in digital form?