Hi. For the most part, I agree with you completely. I am not going to ask
a sighted person to check a book either. If I am in doubt, I will leave
the word alone, even though I know it is wrong. One recent example is
puRhed or some such. It is obviously wrong but I have no idea what it
could be. I am not going to take a chance on inventing a word and possibly
exposing myself and/or bookshare to law suits because the core content of
the book was changed. Someone else can get and rescan the printed book if
it is a big enough deal. Finally, I'll just add that while I don't read
print, I do know that the shapes of letters are different, so t instead of
r could not be an OCR error even if it looks like one because the shape of
the letter is different. But then, one particularly funny scanning error
is "taco" instead of "fate."
At 10:08 AM 3/8/2005 -0600, you wrote:
It is much more likely that r and t would be confused by the OCR software than by the publishers. Yes, they do make mistakes, but you should normally be able to guess correctly about errors. The more experience you have in editing the more you learn what is within the relm of possibility for scannos, and what obviously was a mistake in the book. You know that we can't always make the books we scan perfect, so we don't have to give up scanning and editing if we are blind and can't always check the print book. I am not going to waste the time of sited people asking them to check every little mistake when there is about a one in a million chance that the mistake is not a scanno. If I accidently change/correct a letter that I am certain was a scanno, and it really was a mistake in the book, I'll just pretend that my change was a scanno. ;-)
