Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Source material for eBooks

Executive Summary:

I purchased an eBook from which seems to contain a large number of typographical errors. I'm quite certain that the errors aren't from the author in question. Apart from the fact that . I'd like to get to the bottom of this by polling readers who've purchased the book from other vendors, or perhaps even in other media.

Details

The book is "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson.
I purchased the eBook in ePub format from kobo books on the 4th Nov 2012.

I've purchased books from kobo in the past that have been OK. I've also purchased other eBooks by Neal Stephenson which have not had the same problem.

Some of the errors are repeated several times, and look like they could almost be speech to text errors, but tI don't imagine that being a terribly useful tool for a Science Firction title. They could also be some sort of OCR error, but again, I'm not sure about the consistency there, either.

How you can help

Check the errors below in your eBook/Book and let me know one way or another whether or not they are present! Let me know whether or not you want me to attribute your response(s) personally.

Thanks!

List of suspected errors so far:

The page numbers are as given on my eReader for the ePub version. I've tried to include complete sentences or at least a large enough quote to make it easy to search for.

1. Page 12 - "The logo of nis favorite meedfeed coalesced on the page." - "nis" instead of "his"
2. Page 19 - "Fiona Hackworth had been wandering through the Royal Ecological Conservatory bracketed by her parents, who hoped mat in this way they could keep mud and vegetable debris off her skirts." - "mat" instead of "that"
3. Page 24 - "MPS made consumer goods and ITL made real estate, which was, as everywhere me real money was." - Perhaps "me" instead of "the"
4. Page 25 - ""This tenuous grasp of American culture might have been owing to the fact mat his parents home-schooled him up to the age of fourteen. - "mat" instead of "that"
5. Page 25 - "the Finkle-McGraws belonged to a Methodist church, a Roman Catholic church, and a tiny synagogue mat met in a rented room in Sioux City." -  "mat" instead of "that"
6. Page 26 - "He earned some repute as a wrestler and cross-country runner, but never exploited it for sexual favors, which would have been easy enough in die promiscuous climate of the times." - "die" instead of "the"
7. Page 26 - "—reporters from the coasts kept showing up and announcing, with some bewilderment, mat there had been no looting." - "mat" instead of "that"
8. Page 26 - "Finkle-McGraw began to develop an opinion that was to shape his political views in later years, namely, mat while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be," - "mat" instead of "that"
9. Page 27 - "The held was an obscure one then, the clients tended to be large research institutions, and practical applications seemed far away." - "held" instead of (I suspect) "field"
10. Page 29 - "I am alluding to things well known to me, as they made my own childhood less man idyllic." - "man" instead of "than"
11,12,13. Page 29 - "My life was not without periods of excessive, unreasoning discipline, usally imaposed capriciosly by those responsible for laxity in the first place." - Spelling errors on 3 consecutive words.
14. Page 30 - "and just like mat, the man took some hard ucus out of his pocket and handed them over—and then actually thanked him as he backed away." - "mat" instead of "that"
15. Page 37 - "As mis territory belongs to a nation-state that recognizes the Common Economic Protocol, you are entitled to a hearing of any such charges within the judicial framework of the nation-state in question" - "mis" for "this"|

As it turns out, getting my annotations from the nook back onto the PC was a bit of a pain, but I'm sure this list will be enough to start with.