What on earth is going on with the publishing industry?
The paperback edition of the Memoirs of William T. Sherman put out by CreateSpace this year and recently finished by self contains literally dozens and dozens of typos. Also, the font is too small and the margins almost nonexistent.
Then the paperback edition of Willa Cather’s Death Comes For The Archbishop put out last year by Cassia Press and which I have now started reading turns out to contain two words run together in almost every sentence, something I’m reasonably sure (or at least certainly hope) the author did not intend.
Both of these defects are driving me absolutely batty, particularly the latter, which is the visual equivalent of listening to a CD skip every couple of seconds.
Perhaps I may be rightly criticized for going with low-budget editions. The cry flies round the clubs, “Robbo got what he paid for, the cheap Scot.” But I had thought that even at low-budget publishing houses somebody actually, you know, reads and proofs the product before it hit the shelves.
I guess not.
The Port Stands At Your Elbow 
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August 24, 2010 at 2:56 pm
Kathy
You’re exactly right. In some cases, the author turns in their manuscript (which nowadays is mostly in a pdf file or on a memory stick) and they just go straight to formatting it for print. One author I know of, who regularly pushes out 1000+ page missives, usually receives her galleys about three weeks before it’s to go to print, if she’s lucky. On her most recent novel, she didn’t receive the galleys until ONE WEEK before it was to be printed, and she did not have the time to go over it, line by line, looking for errors and typos. They found them for the second print run, and corrected them, but no one wants to hire a lowly copy editor any more, not when there’s spell check and grammar check.
August 24, 2010 at 8:24 pm
the gripping hand
The missing space error is almost certainly a typesetting error created when the original document was reformatted for the book format. You see it often in emails when the emailer copies text from another source and pastes it into the email. Annoying, and in a professionally-published book, unforgivable.