I know the rules were less stringent only a few years ago, but that sounds like a really bad job of proofing. Even if you don't want to read every word of the book, doing a spelling check and looking for typical scannos like fi ff and fl being scrambled.
And not noticing that the main character's name is misspelled, *gack*I did one book that was an extremely good scan except that the main character's name was Cari, but the ocr put in Cori, Lori, Carl, Cam, Cani and probably a few others I've forgotten since then.
Mike On 4/20/2012 5:14 AM, Ann Parsons wrote:
Hi all,I'm writing because I just sent off a quality report about a book I'm reading. Oh, I'm going to finish the book, it's part of a series I'm reading, but I have a really hard and knotty question to ask volunteers.Here it is, folks. Is it the job of a proofer to actually *read* a book, or can a proofer get away with checking title and so on, and then just pushing the book through?If you answered that you thought you could get away with just checking metadata, you'd be wrong, wrong three times over. This book I'm reading, Divided Allegiance by Elizabeth Moon, has a wonderful title page and front piece. Then, I started actually *reading* the blessed thing. Well, I wasn't reading it, my DTBM was. Anyway, this book's quality was only good. There were a million scanos including the mangling of the main character's name. Do you know how aggravating it can be when your main character, mentioned about ten times per page has her name mangled five out of those ten times? Scannos like 'ff' for 'if' and garbage chars at the end of pages.<frowning darkly> There is no excuse for this kind of sloppiness. Why do you think it takes me weeks to proof a book? It's because I actually read every, single, word in the whole blessed book! I have allowed a book to be sent up after reading half or so of it, but only once. That was because the scanner was known to me, the book I had read so far had been aeror free, and I knew that the quality would be the same throughout! If I proof, I read. All this stuff could have been easily fixed! <grrrrr> Sorry for ranting guys, but I devoutly hope that my rant has stopped any lazy proofers in their tracks and caused them to reexamine their work.Ann P.
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