SOME MINOR KVETCHING….Can I just take a moment to complain about something trivial? Thanks.
I’m about two-thirds of the way through What Liberal Media? and I’ve already counted an even dozen proofreading errors ? and that’s generous since I’m counting repeatedly misspelled names as only a single mistake. I might be wrong about this, but I could swear that 20 years ago I rarely found proofreading errors in books, while today it’s a common occurrence. Is this because (a) people are sloppier today than before, (b) publishers’ budgets have gone down and proofreading has suffered, or (c) I just notice it more than I used to?
UPDATE: Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who should know, writes to say, “I’ve been working in book publishing for two decades, and hanging around writers and editors even longer, and for as long as I can remember, everyone has claimed that books didn’t used to have lots of typos the way they do now. And yet, when I go back and look at routine trade hardcovers from thirty or forty years ago, what I find are: typos.” And reader Diana Waggoner agrees: “The answers to your question today about proofreading are (a), (b), AND (probably) (c).” So there you go.
