Typos in books

[Kiwimommyinlondon]

Just finished Everyone is still alive by Cathy Retzenbrink. Had high hopes for it but found it abysmal. Frustrating to see a number of typos in it too eg main character is Juliet and is referred to as Julie. Makes me lose faith in the book when I see that. Bizarrely, the proofreader is acknowledged in the book too 🤔 Anyone else as picky as me?

Not quite the same, but I've read a few books that set in the UK but use words like sidewalk for pavement and truck for the boot of a car. That lack of detail really puts me off reading it.

*that are set in the UK and trunk for the boot of a car.

FS my attention to detail is lacking never mind these books!!

I report every single typo I spot when reading on my Kindle. Some books don't appear to have been near a proof reader!

In pretty much every book I ever read there are proofreading errors. It’s so unnecessary.

I beta read for a couple of authors. The last one had 247 errors. What the feck was the first reader doing?!

You’re not being 'picky', OP. You’re being totally reasonable. There simply shouldn’t be glaring errors like this.

Typos in books annoy me so much. If I've paid for a book then I expect it not to have errors in it. It's been checked by a proofreader presumably, in addition to the author and editor etc, so there should be no excuse for errors.

I came across a glaring one in a childs picture book over christmas, clearly a typo rather than a misspelling as there were several of the same letter consecutively in a word but I felt unreasonably irked by it.

How hard can it be to proofread when the word count for the whole book is so small, literally a few sentences on each page (12 pages total). Gorgeous book but the pedant in me couldn't get over it.

I got a book out the library that had a typo in the title printed on the cover. I bet the author was kicking themselves when they saw that!

DS brought a book home from primary school: How The Elephant Got It's Trunk.

Funny you should mention it. I just picked up a copy of Jane Austen's "Emma," which I know well enough to notice missing italics, as well as some slight typos. I'm so annoyed that I'm making photocopies and sending them to the publisher.

Not a typo but recently read a book set in WWII. In it, it referred to someone being a Mrs Marple, and also mentioned the whoopie cushion.

Agatha Christie was around before the war, but I questioned whether people would be referred to a Mrs Marple type character, as there wasn’t widespread tv etc then. Also, a whopper cushion had been invented by then, but I again questioned whether it would have been in widespread use in UK then (I may be wrong).

iklboo I'd love that job! How did you get into it, please?

I don't get paid for it, unfortunately. I get a copy of the book and a mention in the acknowledgments. I followed a couple of authors I like on Facebook and one asked for volunteers. I offered & word of mouth has got me a 'stable' of five. It's my two favourite hobbies though - reading & finding fault 😄.

Continuity errors annoy me. I read one over Christmas where a character was randomly referred to by a completely different name - not a variation on her name, another name entirely.

Referring to a Miss Marple character would have meant the books not a tv series. They were published pre war.

Don’t read The In-Laws by James Caine if you get annoyed by errors. Honestly, I don’t think it had been within a million miles of a proofreader - characters were called by the wrong names, there were typos galore, in some chapters it seemed that every other word was in italics and, most annoying, every character spent the whole book smirking. If I’d been reading a physical book rather than on my kindle I’d have gone through it with a red pen and sent it back.

I read Kate Atkinson's Shrines of Gaiety recently and found a shocking number of proofing errors, and a copy-editing gaffe involving characters' names (which there was also obviously a chance to pick up at proof stage), something like 'Jane got in the car and saw that Jane was just coming out of the shop door'.
I was really surprised that for a big book by a best-selling author they didn't get the big editorial guns on it.
Then again, I hate to sound all 'I remember when it were all fields' but I work in publishing and there is definitely an ongoing decline in standards of editorial knowledge and skill.

Then again, I hate to sound all 'I remember when it were all fields' but I work in publishing and there is definitely an ongoing decline in standards of editorial knowledge and skill.

You'd think improvements in technology would improve standards - there must have been a time when correcting a typo or continuity error meant re-typesetting the whole book. I remember reading about when the name 'Roland Butta' was vetoed late in the day for Orwell's 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying' due to copyright issues, Orwell had to choose an alternative that had the same number of letters and spacing to avoid redoing the whole book, hence the rather odd name 'Corner Table' used in the adverts instead.

I didn't know that about the Orwell!

Yes, it's weird and it's pretty worrying. I sometimes ask pretty straightforward questions about in-house preferences for spelling or punctuation, or basic issues about the production process, and in-house editorial staff don't know what I mean. e.g. I've had to explain what I meant by 'dangling modifier', or 'widows'.

I always report typos on my kindle.

Even had "be" instead of "he" in my last book.

Most annoying one I've had was in one of the DI Helen Grace books and a main character is called Charlene nn Charlie. They had her introduce herself as Charlotte which they'd made a huge deal about in earlier books.

I hate typos in a book.

Ah, I thought I was the only one who finds this extremely annoying and it ruins my reading flow!

I’m not sure it was perfect in the past. I’m republishing one of my books originally published in 2007 by a big house. It was copy-edited and proofread in-house by their team and I also went through it many times. I edit for a living in a different field.

When I republished it, I had to correct a few things that nobody had noticed.

I doubt you will find any book ever that is 100% perfect.

It wasn't perfect, no, but I've been doing this for about 15 years and there's a definite downtick in quality. I get things to proofread sometimes that, if I hadn't been sent a copy-editor's style sheet or seen comments from them, I would genuinely think hadn't been touched. Really basic stuff like film titles being sometimes in italic, sometimes roman in quote marks, issues with tenses, greengrocers' apostrophes, names of real people/things/places that are Googleable in about three seconds spelled wrong...