Proof sought
Christmas 2010 was when half the people I know got Kindles. I even got one myself, as a Christmas present for my girlfriend. Suddenly, there are millions more pairs of eyeballs on digital books, many thousands of which belong to acute brains adept at finding errors and misprints. And nearly all of them, I fear, are going to waste.
There are three reasons for this.
First, the Kindle does not encourage you to read free books. (There’s little point proofing commercial books, not so much because they tend to contain fewer errors as because I’ve never come across a non-academic publisher who cares; and anyway, if you’ve paid for a book, shouldn’t someone have proof-read it? I’d be interested to see publisher initiatives here, though; bug bounties, anyone?) This problem is easily fixed, though: many sites offer a huge range of books you can download to your Kindle via its built-in web browser, including the oldest, biggest, and best free online book repositories, Project Gutenberg. So go to, sample the tens of thousands (and rapidly increasing) treasure trove of public domain works, and never pay for a downloaded book again.
Secondly, no ebook or reading program I’ve yet seen has built-in functionality for noting errata. I use bookmarks in FBReaderJ; Kindle users can use notes. But even this primitive method is easy to use and I find it rarely interrupts the flow of reading, even for books containing hundreds of errors. So, note any errors you find!
Thirdly, online libraries often don’t make it obvious that they welcome reports of typos and errors (they do!), or make it easy to send them. (Project Gutenberg changed its email addresses last year, to reduce spam. This wasted my time last year when they introduced the “2010” suffix in April, and again this year when I had to go and check to see if they’d decided to update automatically every year. It seems not. Maybe in April? Really, Gutenberg, just use spam filters, it’s what they’re for.) Many other sites repackage texts from Gutenberg; some fail to update to the latest version, such as Feedbooks, whose books work better on my phone than Gutenberg’s own, but often contain errors already fixed on Gutenberg. (They told me they have to apply updates to their books by hand; I have offered them help with automatic updating, which isn’t rocket science, using tools that programmers use all the time, without success so far.) It’s clearly best to report errors to the original source of the text if at all possible, but if you can’t, don’t worry. Spend a couple of minutes finding how to report typos to wherever you got your book from, and try it; you’ll soon find out if they’re unappreciative.
We have an amazing resource here, and it’ll only get better (if it isn’t. Digital editions, unlike their paper forbears, need not go out of print: errors can be fixed forever. If every reader of a free ebook reports half a dozen errors, even dodgily scanned texts will soon shine. And this is for everybody: free ebooks can be printed and bound, so allowing imaginative publishers, libraries and donors to get them into the hands of those who can’t afford ordinary books, let alone a Kindle.
But aren’t lots of people doing this already? It doesn’t seem so: in 2010 Project Gutenberg started an automated errata tracker, which allocates each new errata report a different number. By the end of 2010 it was up to about 500; by contrast, in 2010 alone several different open source software projects racked up over 100,000 bug reports each [Stop Press: Gutenberg now seems to have abandoned automated erratum numbering.]. Despite its richness, Gutenberg has a handful of full-time employees, and runs on volunteer labour and donations (by definition, they can’t ask for money for their books). And that’s just the biggest Gutenberg project, in the US. To avoid exposing itself to the vagaries of international copyright law across different régimes, the various Gutenberg sites in different countries are entirely independent. Gutenberg Australia, which is the second-biggest original source for English books after Gutenberg US, is run by one person, the heroic Colin Choat, in his spare time.
So, please help!
Last updated 2011/02/15