Lately, I have been reading numerous nonfiction "books" that I downloaded for free from Amazon. They are all e-books and I read them on my Kindle.
They normally sell for anywhere from 99 cents to $2.99 or so. They are not true books; most can be read in an hour. They're more like very long novels. I doubt any of them are more than 40 pages (it's hard to tell on the Kindle, which uses location, not page numbers). I would not have paid for them but when they are offered for free, I download them to have something to read at the doctor's office.
With one exception, all of these books have needed editing. They have poorly written sentences, misspellings, and missing words.
The further I read into the work (I have a hard time calling these things "books"), the more errors I found. What seemed like a decent read in the first few pages soon soured.
I understand that these days the reading public devours anything and no one but grammar gussies such as myself care a whit about real sentences and punctuation. However, I would have been offended had I paid money - even 99 cents - for these books only to find so many errors. One or two errors would not be worthy of comment, but numerous ones are.
And the errors are many, and apparently in most of these books.
If you are thinking of self-publishing, by all means, do it, but please at least run the spell check on your software before you hit the "send" button and hustle the thing off to Amazon.
I have read some of these and have been astounded at the amount of errors. Both in spelling, content, and grammar.
ReplyDeleteI once had to write a review of a book written by a friend and it was as you described. I finally decided to do a feature on the authorr instead and mentioned the book in passing.and preserve the friendship.
ReplyDeleteIt's not solely with non-fiction or ebooks. It's appalling what makes it through some days. :-/
ReplyDelete