I’m one of those readers whose eye catches on typos, grammar, and formatting. As you can imagine, if a book is full of typos (i.e. 1+ in each chapter), it’s a stop-and-go experience to read what is otherwise a good book.
Is it wrong to try contacting the author about the errors that were flagged while reading their book (that I purchased)?
Often, these books are otherwise very good. They’re usually either self-published or from a small publisher, some with an editor credited and some without. I’m not convinced flagging anything using Kindle does anything because it’ll say it’s sent even while offline.
To clarify, I get that some edits can be subjective, but the ones I’m talking about are objective and should have been flagged, especially with an editor (e.g., using “was” when it should be “were”, “me” instead of “I”, duplicate words in a sentence, etc.).
Before you come for my commas, I’m using Canadian English 🙂
by SeaAsk6816
10 Comments
If the books already published there’s not much they can do about it, unless they reprint the book which is time consuming and expensive especially for a few small errors.
If it’s a self published print on demand type book, they -might- be able to fix it, but otherwise there’s not a whole lot they can do, except feel bad/mortified.
I find typos and errors in books from big publishers too.
Many kindle books are scanned from physical books, and end up with lots of errors from that scanning process. I’m not sure the author can even do anything about that, that seems like Amazon’s problem to fix
It’s normal and always has been to have a few typos (misspelled words, extra spaces) per book – not per chapter or per page – even with copy-editors doing their thing. Most readers don’t notice or accept it as part of reading life. As for very poorly-edited books where the typos and errors just keep coming, yeah, that’s certainly annoying af.
However, your examples
> using “was” when it should be “were”, “me” instead of “I”, duplicate words in a sentence, etc.
include two highly subjective and often “mis-corrected” so-called errors and only one clear editing mistake, so your post is giving me more overconfident, misinformed grammar police vibes than anything else.
Don’t write to authors about this stuff, either they already know or there’s nothing they can do about it. It’s frankly just rude.
You can, but there’s nothing authors can do generally. If it is something book breaking, like chapter 10 is from another book or something like that, then a publisher might correct it. But typos? Nope.
And please never use the report typo function on Kindle. All that does is create unfixable headaches.
Nothing wrong about it but it is also unlikely to result in any actual changes.
I used to do it on Kindle, until Charlie Stross pointed out that this causes the book to be removed from sale (not always but almost), often without letting the author know.
I stopped immediately.
I would say unless they self published it doesn’t help anything.
Maybe just point it out in a review of the book? That way the information is available if someone goes looking for it.
There is an often used phrase “nobody likes a smart arse”
It may help in your quest to find an answer to your conundrum.