Day 3 of Nasty Head Cold, so I haven’t gotten as much work done as I planned this week (plus, as a plague-carrier, I should skip this cool WRW workshop tomorrow that I was really looking forward to). But if I couldn’t create, I could consume, and I raced through the first two of Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies books (UGLIES and PRETTIES). I read the first in book form, and the second on my NEW SONY E-READER!!! Woo-hoo!!!
Except, it wasn’t totally great. I expected I’d have to get used to skimming in different-sized chunks and the weird blink whenever I “turn” pages. But I was surprised at all the typos. As a former copy-editor, typos bug me more than they do the average bear and I tell myself just to let them pass, but when there is one every little page or two, that’s just ridiculous.
Some look like basic font-translation troubles: T m or F m for “I’m; whohadto for who had to; sofdly, etc. Other troubles were spacing: Il l for I’ll; Wh y, with the y on the next line; many many missing periods in the middle of lines; and lines breaking in the middle of the line (and sometimes sentence) and continuing on the next line with an indent, signaling ‘new paragraph’ for all us classic-text readers, which is especially confusing when it’s dialogue and we assume paragraph-break means new speaker then have to figure out it doesn’t.
Other typos affected meaning: “David had grown up out in die Smoke.” And, at a pivotal moment: “Afraid 111 break the world?” That one took me right out of the story and got me to thinking about technology and whether I should go check my friendfeed. Still, I did keep reading (after checking FF), thanks to strong storytelling.
I was surprised, as I bought this copy of the story direct from the Sony store, not from a third-party seller and not ripped-off from anywhere, so I expected it would be clean. The e-reading experience was smooth otherwise, and I had to turn back a page only a couple of times to track actions or dialogue when I got distracted. Don’t know if I can read science or Styron this way yet, but dystopian teen fiction reads just fine.
Next up is the e-text of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, which came as a freebee on the reader. Does Sony know its demographic or what?
UPDATE: Just finished EXTRAS on e-reader (read SPECIALS in library-book form), and the text was much, much cleaner. Only thing I noticed was wandering periods (sentence ends .) , usually after italicized text. Whew
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