Typos.. in a book?

United States
March 14, 2013 10:56am CST
Have you ever seen a typo in a book.. like a misspelled word or accidental word? Does it bother you if you see such a thing in a book? I've been reading some of the old Murder She Wrote novels based on the TV show from the 80's and 90's.. and they are some of the worst edited books ever! There are so many typos in each of these books.. as well as other mistakes. In one book they kept referring to the main character as J. D. Fletcher when her name is actually J. B. Fletcher. Hard to believe that was just a typo! It drove me insane!
4 people like this
16 responses
@lucas5 (455)
• Sao Paulo, Brazil
14 Mar 13
I know what you mean. when I was a teacher, I used to get a lot of books where they had a lot of misspelled words, and now I work in a print shop, and the desing always writes the words and specially the addresses worng. thank you for the discussion and sorry for the English!
• United States
14 Mar 13
Are you able to fix it before you print it? Wrong addresses can be a major problem.
1 person likes this
• United States
14 Mar 13
Whoops! I'm sure that costs a lot of money to fix.
1 person likes this
@lucas5 (455)
• Sao Paulo, Brazil
14 Mar 13
yes, after so many problems, we decided that before we print anything, at least 3 people reads it and see if it is right, but even this way, we had a 4 thousand busness card with the name wrong last week. thank you for your comment!
@Pegasus72 (1898)
10 Apr 13
Oh yes I have in Stephen Kings novels to be exact. It is funny they pay for editors but they aren't catching them all either. I kind of like it because it shows even a best seller can have mistakes and kind of brings them down to our level.
• United States
10 Apr 13
Yeah, I agree. I don't read Stephen King anymore though.. used to when I was younger.
@Pegasus72 (1898)
10 Apr 13
I still read him, actually there is a new book that was made into a min series coming out on one of the channels, which we don't get and is called Under the Dome. My husband will get it when it comes to DVD or Netflix for me.
@AmbiePam (84668)
• United States
19 Mar 13
Yes! And I don't know why, but it always surprises me. I thought it was funny how on that show Auction Kings (on the Discovery Channel) they way they were able to know if an old book was indeed an original, was to check it for a couple of typos. Because the first editions apparently had several typos. I believe it was Gone with the Wind they were checking. So apparently even decades later we still can't get rid of typos.
• United States
19 Mar 13
Interesting!
@cynthiann (18602)
• Jamaica
14 Mar 13
Despite being the queen of typos I do not like reading or seeing them in a book. It looks so tacky and drives me insane too. shouldn't they proof read? Or was the proof reader on strike or maybe is was payback time for him/her
• United States
14 Mar 13
Maybe they overwork their proofreaders and they're too tired to catch the mistakes?
@bounce58 (17387)
• Canada
19 Mar 13
There was a time in my old job where I traveled to different suppliers, that I would pick up a book so that I'd have something to do at night, or while waiting on suppliers. I once picked up a book about a quarterback playing football in Italy (I forgot the title). Not only did the text had typos, some of the pages in the book were missing! I gave up on it.
• United States
19 Mar 13
Would be super hard to read if there were a few pages missing.. geez!
@flamez3r0 (319)
• Puerto Rico
14 Mar 13
Hello :). I see typos all the time, even in educational books. I don't really mind when they are sporadic words misspelled, but since I'm from a country that uses Spanish as main language, some translations don't even make sense. When I was in university one of the chemistry books had been translated so badly that some of the experiments didn't even worked. It also affects novels since a lot of English words can be translated in multiple ways to Spanish (depending on what you want to say) a lot of times they don't make any sense at all. It's so confusing I just buy the books in English now, since it seems the translators and editors don't even take the time to read what they are doing.
• United States
14 Mar 13
Geez, you'd think they'd do a better job for an educational book.
• Indonesia
3 Apr 13
Yeah I agree with you. There are a lot of translated books which I read don't even make sense. And the worse thing that I need to learn those books for my test in college. This is why I prefer the original books in English rather than translated books. They are too confusing to read.
@joliefille (3690)
• Philippines
15 Mar 13
I rarely see typos in a textbook. But in some of the ebooks I downloaded it is not surprising to get typos and misaligned texts and paragraphs. I hate when I see misspelled words more than 10 times but since I got a poor copy only of the ebooks I just go ahead and read.
@TheCatLady (4691)
• Israel
14 Mar 13
I hate typos, but there's nothing to be done about them. About half of the first printings have mistakes in them.Text books always had mistakes. It is horrid. Especially if it is a math book. It is impossible to figure out if the answer is wrong because I made a mistake or because the book is wrong.
@dorannmwin (36392)
• United States
16 Mar 13
I don't typically encounter typos in the books that I read, but I do have to say that when I do see them from time to time it really is something that just drives me insane. I thought that the reason that it bothers me so much is because of the fact that I'm a writer and I had a high interest in writing when I was in college so I learned as much as I could about grammatical errors so that I wouldn't make them myself. I don't think that I would be able to read a book with the errors in name throughout the book like you've described.
@twobits (31)
• United States
15 Mar 13
I have always seen an occasional error in a book at times. It usually was small enough and infrequent enough to not bother me. However, now with more self publishing and print on demand books I see it more often and sometimes bad enough to make the book undesirable. Also now with ebooks, you can find quick and dirty conversion that were done by scanning in a paper book then running the result through an OCR program. These are often unreadable for me and can often result in the error like you saw of a B becoming a D depending on the fonts used in the original book. Were you reading a book or an ebook? Even it it was a book, they perhaps reprinted it using an OCRed source if it was a recent printing of an older book?
• Philippines
15 Mar 13
Hell, yeah! Typos and misspelled words are all over. English is not my first language so this is just not a good thing. And you are right, even these informative school books do have them. Some books have second editions or more just to have these errors corrected.
@Liliac26 (557)
• Romania
14 Mar 13
I do see typos in books sometimes, but they don't really bother me. Mistakes can happen to anyone, and if there's only a few of them, they don't take anything away from my reading experience. But, to be honest, I've never seen the kind of error you talk about (systematically misspelling a character's name). I'm sure that would bother me intensely. I mean this looks more like carelessness or incompetence on the part of the editors (or whoever was responsible) than the accidental "we're all human" mistake I sometimes come across.
• United States
14 Mar 13
I know, it's aggravating! Sometimes it's just small errors I can overlook.. but this one particular book had constant errors, really bad ones.. it looked like it hadn't been edited at all!
@natliegleb (5175)
• India
14 Mar 13
i also have experienced it and most of the typo,the typo words will be over written always
• India
15 Mar 13
yeah i have seen it many time and you are right they mostly occured in the mid 80s and 90s , when i was in school days there came a notice with correction that holds all the words which was supposed to be corrected. and our class teacher corrected all those. and that was headache when it came to the correction.
@fineartist (1217)
• United States
14 Mar 13
I don't recall having seen typos in a book. But, if I did, I would not be happy about it. Have a good day!
• United States
14 Mar 13
I agree even today there are misspelled words in novels today. This technology now helps but sometimes a human eye works wonders.