Laura June (@laura_june), features editor for The Verge (@verge), observes that “ebooks are apparently lousy with typos.”
Many of the typos — the letter "c" in place of what should be an "e" — appear to be the casualties of a hasty OCRing of some actual text of the work. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a process of scanning a book and using software which recognizes the scanned words as words, rather than merely as images, converting the images into text files. Anyone who has ever used OCR software knows that the process is far from perfect and always demands a serious attention to detail in the copy editing phase, once scanning is done, because the software doesn’t "read" the text perfectly. This seems to be at least partially what is happening in my Kindle edition of Foucault’s Pendulum, and it’s unacceptable....
[P]ublishing is changing very fast, and to keep up with that pace, publishers are moving quickly to get their books into stores like Amazon and iBooks. That’s great, I want as much content available as possible. But I also demand, and believe that all readers should demand, the high quality that book publishers have always offered to their customers....
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