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What’s the worst proofreading you’ve found in a book?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2026
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I can't present proof because I did not bought the book then and the copy I have today no longer has any typos, indication of someone going through the work again and reviewing it but the worst proof-read book I ever encountered was a portuguese translation of Michael Crichton Canibals. It was so bad it felt the book, back in the early 00's had been put through a machine auto-translator and just sent direct to print.
Missing letters in words, random capitalization of words mid-sentence, ortographic errors, repeated sentences, broken paragraphs, mixed paragraphs, etc.
I should have bought and kept that book. I wish I could find a copy of that specific edition. It wasn't poorly proof-read and edited. It was cursed.
I wonder if that’s the same book the other user can’t think of.
It does get me thinking sometimes, one thing I’ve russled around is that scifi could be harder, it’s not as easy to rely to the spellcheck in Word for example. Lots of throwaway words. Simpler when writing specificly about earth and history.
But most of the books I read predate that as well, how common place was Word in 94, and would a good portion of authors use it?
My father in law worked in a print shop for fifty years. Before computers and machine translation and spell checking the process of preparing a book for print was extremely involved and went through many verification steps. Where he worked did not print sci-fi books but they did print poetry and translated texts. Proof reading was done by several people, sequencially. Print proofs were made to check for formatting. The work was done in steps planed to eliminate as many errors as possible at each stage. Computers made a lot things easier but also created new problems.
On the other hand, setting the printing press could also introduce typos as well that wasn’t in the draft.
It’s definitely not easy to print literature.
And that’s also not entirely what I’ve heard, some authors do their own proofreading and that’s it, so each publisher probably does their own thing too.
My father in law still worked with lead printing blocks that had to be mannualy set on the plate. Novices on the task would have their work checked; seasoned workers developed the hability to read text backwards. There were typos and mistakes, obviously, but not as many as one would expect.
I proof read my own writings as well but it comes a point where a fresh set of eyes is highly advisable to find those little quirks and easily overlooked mistakes. If publishers can't be bothered to check their author's work, something is very wrong. An author self publishing doing some mistakes is forgiveable but publishers spent to much time and resources making themselves the only "professional and legitimate way" to be published to enjoy the same leniency.