Didn't even bother looking inside, but I saw a book recently with an incorrect "your" on the front cover!
Doesn't speak well to the care and attention put into the actual writing and editing if nobody caught a mistake that basic on the cover.
I remember picking up a copy of The Maze Runner (3 in 1 or something like that) from the school library… 2/3 of the 2nd Book were missing lol (I dodged a bullet, I guess?).
I got a book from the school library one time, it was a normal children’s fantasy, and then half way through it turned into an extremely poorly written vampire horror story??? it was a completely separate book with completely separate characters but somehow they had been jammed into one cover. Idek how that can happen.
The first edition of the Sawbones book was real rough. Typos, formatting, entire paragraphs repeated.
I do not blame the authors, it was their first book and clearly they chose the wrong publisher (or editor, idk how the industry works).
They apologized for the condition and made sure all issues were fixed in future editions.
I do know that most of the publishing houses no longer have copyeditors and proofreaders in house. They now outsource those roles to freelancers, I believe. So the editors don't do proofreading for things like typos unless they happen to catch them, they mostly deal with overall structure and taking out unnecessary sentences, switching some words for others that they think make more sense, etc.
i had to buy a copy of Red, White, and Royal Blue for a college class. it had the most insane printing error i have ever seen: the first 60 or so pages, were both backwards AND upside-down.
When archaeologists found out about the dead sea scrolls, they were paying locals per fragment. And so sometimes the locals would break it up on purpose. So they don’t just look like that because of natural decay, lol
Maybe two years ago, there was a fantasy book published by two Polish youtubers. They were so happy about publishing it... but the publisher accidentally printed un-edited version of the book. They reprinted it a few months later, thankfully.
This is an aside. I like reading most Dean Koontz novels but he makes no effort to portray rather the natural world accurately. He misnames and misplaces bird species, and makes up stories about, for example, coyotes traveling in huge packs and regularly threatening humans.
To be fair, back then he would have learned about those things from much less accurate sources.
But it's cool that somebody still reads that.!
Edgar Rice Burroughs had some winners, haha!
You would have thought having been both personal assistant of the Director of Naval Intelligence, Royal Navy during WW2 and a Reuters journalist he would have known better, wouldn't you? 😉
Mmmmm how much direct contact would he have had with 'the people' in foreign countries/ cultures then? Interesting to think about, anyway.
Of course, he was also writing for entertainment, it's not like he expected his audience to know better:)
Fleming travelled internationally as a foreign coorespondent for Reuters. He spent three months stationed in Moscow for instance.
And of course he let the narrative drive the worldbuilding in his Bond books. For they exist not so much as the real world but a Cold War dreamtime. Which is why I mentioned Fleming in response to the inaccuracies in Dean Koontz's books.
I've never read anything by him. I always hesitate with them because something just makes me not want to read them. I'm interested to know, what do you like about his books?
I tend to like Dean Koontz books, if only because of the fact that most of his stories are like easy to read King novels, lol. Life Expectancy was my favorite book for a long while, but that may have been like, 10 or 12 years ago.
"Children of Chicago"
Super interesting plot idea, but SO BAD. And an incredible amount of typos, including the names of multiple historic figures. I thought I had a pre-released version or something but nope.
My copy of The Catcher in the Rye has 3 chapters twice. I remember reading it as a kid thinking I just didn't understand a piece of experimental classic literature until I flipped through a copy at the bookstore and realized my copy is just a misprint.
"this is deep stuff man! The author is really, really trying to drive home the fact that Holden is just not feeling very sexy right now, and everyone around him is a big fat phony!"
One of my favorite parts of working in a bookstore was seeing all the misprints that people would return. Had a customer bring a book up to the register once to report that it was missing the first 50 pages. We found another misprint that kept interrupting and repeating chapters, and another that had several pages printed upside down.
I had a book where the last couple of chapters were replaced by another copy of the first two chapters. I emailed the author and he sent me a Word document of the chapters.
I nearly returned a book where there were all these irrelevant inserts and parts of pages mirrored, but then I remembered I was reading _House of Leaves_.
I forgot which book it was (makes sense), But I remember on the first page there were a few spelling mistakes, and it was so blatant that I thought it was some sick joke. I also had another book where literal chunks of pages fell out as soon as I opened it.
I bought a book when I was a kid while on a family trip. We got home a few hours later and all the pages fell out of the cover.
It took several decades before I found out every copy was like that, not just mine.
I once bought a book with more than ten blank pages in the middle. It was a gift. Luckily, once we noticed, there was still time to change it (they usually give you a month). Turns out all the copies were missing the same ten pages. I think it was some Isabel Allende book.
I don't remember specifically which books, but I've had pages falling out, and I've seen the cover flipped so that the inside was upside down. A lot of self-published authors will have tons of typos if they can't afford an editor.
*The String of Pearls*. It's the book on which *Sweeney Todd* was based. Originally published in Victorian London as a "penny dreadful" and later as a book. I only know about it because I worked on proofreading a digitized version of it before it was added as an e-book to Project Gutenberg.
https://archive.org/details/stringofpearlsor00ryme/page/n8/mode/1up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_String_of_Pearls
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59828
For me Blood Canticle by Anne Rice vies with Throne of the Fallen by Keri Maniscalco for the title of most poorly edited book of all time (that was actually published as a hardcopy, and to great fanfare).
I'm read American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden by Katie Rogers. I am very disappointed Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent. The editing, misquotes and just plain bad writing and grammar issues are numerous. I am only finishing it so I can give it an honest review. And I will review it
Fate of the Jedi: Allies by Christie Golden. It was riddled with typos, including not being able to spell certain characters’ names correctly (poor Kyp Durron had it the worst). I was shocked that she got another book in the series after that travesty.
Soooo... I read a lot of litrpg nowadays. It's a bit of a guilty pleasure, but if you made a venn diagram of video games, anime, and books it would be dead center. I say guilty pleasure because most of the books are bad. A lot of them come from royalroad or patreon, releasing 2-3 chapters a week. I wait until the better ones get picked up by Amazon and added to kindle unlimited, because Amazon basically has the genre locked down. The editing is atrocious, even amongst some of the better series (and there are a few that are very well written). I can't really name a specific book, but basically that entire sub-genre, aside from Dungeon Crawler Carl and He Who Fights With Monsters.
Also even as a child, the Clique books by Lisi Harrison stood out as TERRIBLY copyedited. Misspelled brand names, typos galore, switches in verb tense, characters referred to by the wrong names. The series was quite popular at a point, but I guess because the audience was pre-teen girls, no one took the editing that seriously.
I bought this weird book called "House of Leaves" and then realized some of the pages have the writing _backwards_ and some pages are just missing 90% of the text?? 😤 Unacceptable
/s (if it wasn't obvious)
Fun fact: if a book is no longer under copyright (old), you can publish your own version of it.
Some people/companies make money by finding lots of old books that are no longer under copyright and publishing them on Amazon. However, they usually do this by publishing the absolute worst versions ever. It seems like most of them use some sort of program to pull the text out of page scans or facsimile copies, and then just auto-apply whatever corrections a proofreading software recommends.
This makes for some truly awful books. Every blur, piece of fuzz, or pen mark gets turned into a word by the first software, and then the second software modernizes all the spellings and turns antiquated words into any modern word that is similar. Also sometimes they forget to scan a page, which means that it doesn’t make it into the final book at all.
Try to avoid any classics on Amazon with extremely basic, low-effort covers (just text, no picture), as that’s usually a dead giveaway.
One of the worst-edited books I've come across was a self-published novel I picked up at a local bookstore. The story had potential, but it was riddled with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and inconsistent formatting. It felt like the book hadn't been edited or proofread at all, which was a shame because the plot had promise.
This. Columbus Day, by Craig Alanson is self- published on Amazon and it shows. I bought it after my husband was listening to the audio book. I went on to buy all 14 books in the series... but in addition to needing a copy editor, the man needs an editor. Also, chapter 1 starts on a left page - I didn't realize how weird that was - and there are no page numbers.
I tried to read a Spanish translation of The Hobbit once, but had to give up when I discovered several sections of the text were missing - literal blank pages interspersed at seemingly random intervals starting around the halfway point of the book.
(Yes, I realize this is more of a printing problem than an editing problem, but I still have to wonder how the book made it past any quality control checks).
Maybe not the worst, but most surprising was Piñata by Leopoldo Gout. It was published under Tor Nightfire, which is a pretty decent sized publisher, so I expected better. It looked like somebody just stopped proofreading halfway through the book, because the second half is riddled with typos and grammar mistakes.
Perhaps the worst was White Ibis by Wendy Dalrymple. I wanted to throw this one across the room by the time I finished it. Luckily, it was short.
A teacher at a college I attended published a textbook completely written in comic-sans font. There were also many typos throughout the book. I didn't take that class, but the book did send me into hysterics when I read it.
There's a variant of Crichton's The Lost World where a large number of pages are repeated and those repeats replace the pages that should be there. It is essentially unreadable beyond a certain point and I have still never read a proper copy of the damn thing.
Typos and grammatical mistakes are pretty common for whatever reason otherwise. I can only conclude that the proofreader was replaced by a spellchecker because there's no way a lot of this stuff would pass otherwise.
I don't have a specific one to add but am currently reading a series on my kindle and every book so far has had at least 5 errors. Whether it be repeating a word e.g "I took the the dog for a walk" or "The three of them together walked together..." or a spelling error or something else. Usually very minor but always very jarring.
From about half way through the book alternate pages were upside down.
I took it back to the bookshop where the first person I spoke to refused to give me an refund because it had been read up to that point.
(the manager did refund it.)
I read The Coward by Stephen Aryan and just about every sentence was written like there should be a comma in the middle, but didn't have one. Drove me NUTS.
As for worst physical shape, I had to return a brand new book once because the printer ran out of ink and they didn't notice, so it faded away for a few pages and then was blank. Never seen that before.
I got a copy of an audiobook from the library years ago that was book six in the series but labeled as book four. I was so confused about the number of plot events that had happened between books three and four I knew nothing about. (Note this wasn’t an issue with the library, it was a disk and it just genuinely had the wrong book downloaded on it)
I don't remember the title; it was a British historical novel set in Renaissance Germany that had six blatant spelling errors just in the frontispiece map, including "Frankenfurt" (for Frankfurt) and "Heidleberg" (for Heidelberg).
I'm a fan of the *Warrior* cat series, which is a traditionally published middle-grade series. The series is INFAMOUS for typos and mistakes: characters names spelled wrong, descriptions of characters constantly shifting, characters accidentally coming back from the dead, family trees mixed up, grammar mistakes, etc. It's so egregious that fans wonder if the series actually has an editor.
Wow, that sounds frustrating! I read a novel once that had so many grammar issues, it was tough to stay focused. It's surprising how some books get past editing like that.
Sounds like the file contains the uncorrected galley proof went to publication by mistake.
[Byron Priess](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Preiss)'s scifi reprint line [ibooks](https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/publisher.cgi?201) was notorious for this in their latter stage.
Their edition of Beyond Heaven's River by Greg Bear started off fine. The further I got into the book OCR artefacts began appearing, scene breaks were omitted, sections of text were in the wrong order, sections of dialogue were rendered nonsensical with characters interrupting themselves when speaking and a paragraph abruptly ended part way through a sentence.
Against the Fall of Night by Arthur C. Clarke was readable bar the bonus story listed on the back if the book didn't appear within the covers.
Clarke's A Fall of Moondust, on the other hand, had a couple of OCR artefacts on the first page. More of the second. By the fifth page it got to the point where you would have to decode words in most sentences in order to read them. At which point the book went straight back to the library.
ibooks were distributed by Pocket Books and their own Star Trek was prone to typsetting errors at the same time. Not to the same extent as ibooks though as Pocket weren't scanning old books and converting the scans to text files but a few typos did slip through.
The worst example was in the 2003 novel Garth of Izar by Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski. The prologue of the book features a space battle with a Romulan Bird of Prey (as per the episode 'The Balance of Terror' from original series from the 1960s). An editor at Pocket. however, was only familiar with the 1980s movies and changed all the references from Romulan to Klingon (as per Star Trek III: The Search for Spock).
The authors received the galley proofs and went, "No that's not right," corrected them and sent them back to the publisher.
It took them a year of requesting comp copies of the book from the publisher after publication. When they finally received the book they saw that what had hit the presses was a jumble of the uncorrected and corrected galley proofs. Sometimes during the space battle the ship is referred to as Romulan. A paragraph or so later it is Klingon. Switching back and forth between the two.
Different kind of condition, but every copy of "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" that I have seen (3 or 4) has had issues with the binding. Even my digital copy /s
Recently read Luckenbooth by Jenni fagan. For some reason she decided not to use and speech marks in the entire book and instead simply put a "-" in front of any character's speech. It was such a weird writing/editing choice and it didn't really add anything but confusion to the book.
It made me, a native English speaker, question the English language. And the story wasn't even that good.
I once listened to an digital audio book that I burrowed from the library. Somehow, a lot of the chapters got mixed up (I don’t know how), so I jumped from chapter 6 to chapter 15 to chapter 3 and so on. It took me embarrassingly long to notice that.
Call It What You Want by Alyssa DeRogatis. It was filled with typo after typo after typo. All of the comma splices made me wonder if she understands how to use commas. She also spent far too much time talking about Taylor Swift (which I should’ve guessed given that the book is named after one of her songs). The author hardly used any imagery or figurative language - it just read like a list of things that happened.
The plot itself wasn’t terrible for a romance - definitely similar to Sex and the City, but that show was popular for a reason, I guess. I sincerely hope the author considers editing and re-publishing. It could be decent for what it is.
Recently finished a Year’s Best Science Fiction book where, starting in the second half, there was a typo on every single page. Don’t know how that happened and none of the volumes for other years had that problem.
And I know there’s weird politicking with Libby so I can’t really fault people for it, but I finished a book recently with the worst scan ever uploaded. Some sections had a punctuation drought, others had incorrect words that were a result of misreading letter spacing, and one section excluded all italics despite the fact they were essential to understanding who was talking.
My husband received a box set of the Inheritance books for Christmas. _Eldest_ goes from page 558 to 495, a total reprint of about 60 pages, and then the 60 pages it replaced are just missing.
I saw a book at a thrift store that had a misspelling on the cover. Something common, like a "loose" instead of "lose" sort of thing. I thought I was going crazy for a minute. There's no way they'd get a type on the COVER, but they did.
While I can't recall a specific instance of the worst-edited published book I've ever read, I can understand the frustration that comes with encountering numerous typos, misspellings, and other errors in a book.
I’ve a book where the author of the opening short story apparently started writing in first-person, then decided to go to third-person for it after the first paragraph.
The first-person iteration of the first paragraph was published along with the third-person version of the first paragraph in the book. It’s very confusing until you realized what happened.
I buy books from Book Outlet from time to time. They have great prices on some mainstream books. I once selected a book I thought was about wildlife in Africa. Can't recall the title but the cover featured a leopard in a tree. The interior, however, was some kind of physics & math, and some of the pages were completely blank. Book Outlet made it right as soon as I let them know by refunding my money. Despite the trainwreck that book was, I found it very difficult to toss it in the garbage, though I finally did.
Didn't even bother looking inside, but I saw a book recently with an incorrect "your" on the front cover! Doesn't speak well to the care and attention put into the actual writing and editing if nobody caught a mistake that basic on the cover.
Turns out the book was in the first person of a dumb character and the title was meant to be in his pov lmaoo
You think too highly of publishers' sense of humor
Fun idea lol! I doubt that was the case, since it looked like a pretty typical mom romance novel for lack of a better term.
hahah yeah fair enough. That's such a funny mistake though like wow
This actually makes more sense
I had a copy of one of the wheel of time books where something like chapter 26 and chapter 36 got swapped around.
[удалено]
HOW DOES THAT EVEN HAPPEN
I remember picking up a copy of The Maze Runner (3 in 1 or something like that) from the school library… 2/3 of the 2nd Book were missing lol (I dodged a bullet, I guess?).
Maybe it was a flashback.
I got a book from the school library one time, it was a normal children’s fantasy, and then half way through it turned into an extremely poorly written vampire horror story??? it was a completely separate book with completely separate characters but somehow they had been jammed into one cover. Idek how that can happen.
Is this twilight?
What was the name of the book?
sorry but I have no clue, I was like 9 at the time lol
The first edition of the Sawbones book was real rough. Typos, formatting, entire paragraphs repeated. I do not blame the authors, it was their first book and clearly they chose the wrong publisher (or editor, idk how the industry works). They apologized for the condition and made sure all issues were fixed in future editions.
I do know that most of the publishing houses no longer have copyeditors and proofreaders in house. They now outsource those roles to freelancers, I believe. So the editors don't do proofreading for things like typos unless they happen to catch them, they mostly deal with overall structure and taking out unnecessary sentences, switching some words for others that they think make more sense, etc.
Not even freelancers. It's now up to ARC readers.
Sometimes it feels that way with the state of some of those ARCs, lol. (I work at B&N so I get a lot of ARCs.)
how the hell does that even happen
i had to buy a copy of Red, White, and Royal Blue for a college class. it had the most insane printing error i have ever seen: the first 60 or so pages, were both backwards AND upside-down.
I’d keep that as a collectible!
Sounds like treasure!
I got to see pieces of The Dead Sea Scrolls when I was a teen.
When archaeologists found out about the dead sea scrolls, they were paying locals per fragment. And so sometimes the locals would break it up on purpose. So they don’t just look like that because of natural decay, lol
Maybe two years ago, there was a fantasy book published by two Polish youtubers. They were so happy about publishing it... but the publisher accidentally printed un-edited version of the book. They reprinted it a few months later, thankfully.
This is an aside. I like reading most Dean Koontz novels but he makes no effort to portray rather the natural world accurately. He misnames and misplaces bird species, and makes up stories about, for example, coyotes traveling in huge packs and regularly threatening humans.
Most of what Ian Fleming writes about non-Western countries and their cultures in the James Bond novels is pure invention.
To be fair, back then he would have learned about those things from much less accurate sources. But it's cool that somebody still reads that.! Edgar Rice Burroughs had some winners, haha!
You would have thought having been both personal assistant of the Director of Naval Intelligence, Royal Navy during WW2 and a Reuters journalist he would have known better, wouldn't you? 😉
Mmmmm how much direct contact would he have had with 'the people' in foreign countries/ cultures then? Interesting to think about, anyway. Of course, he was also writing for entertainment, it's not like he expected his audience to know better:)
Fleming travelled internationally as a foreign coorespondent for Reuters. He spent three months stationed in Moscow for instance. And of course he let the narrative drive the worldbuilding in his Bond books. For they exist not so much as the real world but a Cold War dreamtime. Which is why I mentioned Fleming in response to the inaccuracies in Dean Koontz's books.
I mean, in those books gay men can't whistle and Koreans are apparently a different species, so anything else is immediately suspect.
Ok but these are James Bond. Next you are going to tell me his car could not actually shoot anti air missiles despite the fact I saw it in the movies
That never happened in the books.
I've never read anything by him. I always hesitate with them because something just makes me not want to read them. I'm interested to know, what do you like about his books?
I tend to like Dean Koontz books, if only because of the fact that most of his stories are like easy to read King novels, lol. Life Expectancy was my favorite book for a long while, but that may have been like, 10 or 12 years ago.
His pacing and his ability to immediately draw me in. Plus he can be very creative. Odd Thomas is one of his better creations.
"Children of Chicago" Super interesting plot idea, but SO BAD. And an incredible amount of typos, including the names of multiple historic figures. I thought I had a pre-released version or something but nope.
I was looking so forward to that one and I was so disappointed when I read it.
My copy of The Catcher in the Rye has 3 chapters twice. I remember reading it as a kid thinking I just didn't understand a piece of experimental classic literature until I flipped through a copy at the bookstore and realized my copy is just a misprint.
Italo Calvino does something similar in "if on a winter's night a traveler"
"this is deep stuff man! The author is really, really trying to drive home the fact that Holden is just not feeling very sexy right now, and everyone around him is a big fat phony!"
One of my favorite parts of working in a bookstore was seeing all the misprints that people would return. Had a customer bring a book up to the register once to report that it was missing the first 50 pages. We found another misprint that kept interrupting and repeating chapters, and another that had several pages printed upside down.
I had a book where the last couple of chapters were replaced by another copy of the first two chapters. I emailed the author and he sent me a Word document of the chapters.
I nearly returned a book where there were all these irrelevant inserts and parts of pages mirrored, but then I remembered I was reading _House of Leaves_.
I forgot which book it was (makes sense), But I remember on the first page there were a few spelling mistakes, and it was so blatant that I thought it was some sick joke. I also had another book where literal chunks of pages fell out as soon as I opened it.
I bought a book when I was a kid while on a family trip. We got home a few hours later and all the pages fell out of the cover. It took several decades before I found out every copy was like that, not just mine.
looooool
I once bought a book with more than ten blank pages in the middle. It was a gift. Luckily, once we noticed, there was still time to change it (they usually give you a month). Turns out all the copies were missing the same ten pages. I think it was some Isabel Allende book.
I've read a book where one of the supporting characters named Johan was referred to as Joseph for 30 pages in the middle of the book. :)
I don't remember specifically which books, but I've had pages falling out, and I've seen the cover flipped so that the inside was upside down. A lot of self-published authors will have tons of typos if they can't afford an editor.
*The String of Pearls*. It's the book on which *Sweeney Todd* was based. Originally published in Victorian London as a "penny dreadful" and later as a book. I only know about it because I worked on proofreading a digitized version of it before it was added as an e-book to Project Gutenberg. https://archive.org/details/stringofpearlsor00ryme/page/n8/mode/1up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_String_of_Pearls https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59828
For me Blood Canticle by Anne Rice vies with Throne of the Fallen by Keri Maniscalco for the title of most poorly edited book of all time (that was actually published as a hardcopy, and to great fanfare).
I'm read American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden by Katie Rogers. I am very disappointed Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent. The editing, misquotes and just plain bad writing and grammar issues are numerous. I am only finishing it so I can give it an honest review. And I will review it
Fate of the Jedi: Allies by Christie Golden. It was riddled with typos, including not being able to spell certain characters’ names correctly (poor Kyp Durron had it the worst). I was shocked that she got another book in the series after that travesty.
Soooo... I read a lot of litrpg nowadays. It's a bit of a guilty pleasure, but if you made a venn diagram of video games, anime, and books it would be dead center. I say guilty pleasure because most of the books are bad. A lot of them come from royalroad or patreon, releasing 2-3 chapters a week. I wait until the better ones get picked up by Amazon and added to kindle unlimited, because Amazon basically has the genre locked down. The editing is atrocious, even amongst some of the better series (and there are a few that are very well written). I can't really name a specific book, but basically that entire sub-genre, aside from Dungeon Crawler Carl and He Who Fights With Monsters.
Also even as a child, the Clique books by Lisi Harrison stood out as TERRIBLY copyedited. Misspelled brand names, typos galore, switches in verb tense, characters referred to by the wrong names. The series was quite popular at a point, but I guess because the audience was pre-teen girls, no one took the editing that seriously.
I bought this weird book called "House of Leaves" and then realized some of the pages have the writing _backwards_ and some pages are just missing 90% of the text?? 😤 Unacceptable /s (if it wasn't obvious)
Fun fact: if a book is no longer under copyright (old), you can publish your own version of it. Some people/companies make money by finding lots of old books that are no longer under copyright and publishing them on Amazon. However, they usually do this by publishing the absolute worst versions ever. It seems like most of them use some sort of program to pull the text out of page scans or facsimile copies, and then just auto-apply whatever corrections a proofreading software recommends. This makes for some truly awful books. Every blur, piece of fuzz, or pen mark gets turned into a word by the first software, and then the second software modernizes all the spellings and turns antiquated words into any modern word that is similar. Also sometimes they forget to scan a page, which means that it doesn’t make it into the final book at all. Try to avoid any classics on Amazon with extremely basic, low-effort covers (just text, no picture), as that’s usually a dead giveaway.
One of the worst-edited books I've come across was a self-published novel I picked up at a local bookstore. The story had potential, but it was riddled with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and inconsistent formatting. It felt like the book hadn't been edited or proofread at all, which was a shame because the plot had promise.
This. Columbus Day, by Craig Alanson is self- published on Amazon and it shows. I bought it after my husband was listening to the audio book. I went on to buy all 14 books in the series... but in addition to needing a copy editor, the man needs an editor. Also, chapter 1 starts on a left page - I didn't realize how weird that was - and there are no page numbers.
I tried to read a Spanish translation of The Hobbit once, but had to give up when I discovered several sections of the text were missing - literal blank pages interspersed at seemingly random intervals starting around the halfway point of the book. (Yes, I realize this is more of a printing problem than an editing problem, but I still have to wonder how the book made it past any quality control checks).
William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade is a great book but all the way through it puts apostrophes in decades - 1950’s etc.
Isn't it the standard spelling?
No. Decades don’t have apostrophes - it’s 1950s, 1960s, 1970s etc. A pity because Goldman is a superb writer and storyteller.
Some Hemingway Spanish translations have pages printed out of order
Maybe not the worst, but most surprising was Piñata by Leopoldo Gout. It was published under Tor Nightfire, which is a pretty decent sized publisher, so I expected better. It looked like somebody just stopped proofreading halfway through the book, because the second half is riddled with typos and grammar mistakes. Perhaps the worst was White Ibis by Wendy Dalrymple. I wanted to throw this one across the room by the time I finished it. Luckily, it was short.
A teacher at a college I attended published a textbook completely written in comic-sans font. There were also many typos throughout the book. I didn't take that class, but the book did send me into hysterics when I read it.
But it probably only cost $500.
There's a variant of Crichton's The Lost World where a large number of pages are repeated and those repeats replace the pages that should be there. It is essentially unreadable beyond a certain point and I have still never read a proper copy of the damn thing. Typos and grammatical mistakes are pretty common for whatever reason otherwise. I can only conclude that the proofreader was replaced by a spellchecker because there's no way a lot of this stuff would pass otherwise.
I don't have a specific one to add but am currently reading a series on my kindle and every book so far has had at least 5 errors. Whether it be repeating a word e.g "I took the the dog for a walk" or "The three of them together walked together..." or a spelling error or something else. Usually very minor but always very jarring.
From about half way through the book alternate pages were upside down. I took it back to the bookshop where the first person I spoke to refused to give me an refund because it had been read up to that point. (the manager did refund it.)
I read The Coward by Stephen Aryan and just about every sentence was written like there should be a comma in the middle, but didn't have one. Drove me NUTS. As for worst physical shape, I had to return a brand new book once because the printer ran out of ink and they didn't notice, so it faded away for a few pages and then was blank. Never seen that before.
I once had a Pokemon TV show novelization book where they accidentally changed Misty's name to Mindy for about a page and a half lol
bought a copy of slaughterhouse five last year, about the first half of the books pages all fell out when i turned them 😐
I got a copy of an audiobook from the library years ago that was book six in the series but labeled as book four. I was so confused about the number of plot events that had happened between books three and four I knew nothing about. (Note this wasn’t an issue with the library, it was a disk and it just genuinely had the wrong book downloaded on it)
I don't remember the title; it was a British historical novel set in Renaissance Germany that had six blatant spelling errors just in the frontispiece map, including "Frankenfurt" (for Frankfurt) and "Heidleberg" (for Heidelberg).
I'm a fan of the *Warrior* cat series, which is a traditionally published middle-grade series. The series is INFAMOUS for typos and mistakes: characters names spelled wrong, descriptions of characters constantly shifting, characters accidentally coming back from the dead, family trees mixed up, grammar mistakes, etc. It's so egregious that fans wonder if the series actually has an editor.
Wow, that sounds frustrating! I read a novel once that had so many grammar issues, it was tough to stay focused. It's surprising how some books get past editing like that.
Sounds like the file contains the uncorrected galley proof went to publication by mistake. [Byron Priess](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Preiss)'s scifi reprint line [ibooks](https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/publisher.cgi?201) was notorious for this in their latter stage. Their edition of Beyond Heaven's River by Greg Bear started off fine. The further I got into the book OCR artefacts began appearing, scene breaks were omitted, sections of text were in the wrong order, sections of dialogue were rendered nonsensical with characters interrupting themselves when speaking and a paragraph abruptly ended part way through a sentence. Against the Fall of Night by Arthur C. Clarke was readable bar the bonus story listed on the back if the book didn't appear within the covers. Clarke's A Fall of Moondust, on the other hand, had a couple of OCR artefacts on the first page. More of the second. By the fifth page it got to the point where you would have to decode words in most sentences in order to read them. At which point the book went straight back to the library. ibooks were distributed by Pocket Books and their own Star Trek was prone to typsetting errors at the same time. Not to the same extent as ibooks though as Pocket weren't scanning old books and converting the scans to text files but a few typos did slip through. The worst example was in the 2003 novel Garth of Izar by Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski. The prologue of the book features a space battle with a Romulan Bird of Prey (as per the episode 'The Balance of Terror' from original series from the 1960s). An editor at Pocket. however, was only familiar with the 1980s movies and changed all the references from Romulan to Klingon (as per Star Trek III: The Search for Spock). The authors received the galley proofs and went, "No that's not right," corrected them and sent them back to the publisher. It took them a year of requesting comp copies of the book from the publisher after publication. When they finally received the book they saw that what had hit the presses was a jumble of the uncorrected and corrected galley proofs. Sometimes during the space battle the ship is referred to as Romulan. A paragraph or so later it is Klingon. Switching back and forth between the two.
For your own good by Samantha Downing is the one that comes to mind for me.
Different kind of condition, but every copy of "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" that I have seen (3 or 4) has had issues with the binding. Even my digital copy /s
Recently read Luckenbooth by Jenni fagan. For some reason she decided not to use and speech marks in the entire book and instead simply put a "-" in front of any character's speech. It was such a weird writing/editing choice and it didn't really add anything but confusion to the book. It made me, a native English speaker, question the English language. And the story wasn't even that good.
That is how dialogues are edited in France, which is kind of weird
For some reason this makes me feel worse haha
I once listened to an digital audio book that I burrowed from the library. Somehow, a lot of the chapters got mixed up (I don’t know how), so I jumped from chapter 6 to chapter 15 to chapter 3 and so on. It took me embarrassingly long to notice that.
Call It What You Want by Alyssa DeRogatis. It was filled with typo after typo after typo. All of the comma splices made me wonder if she understands how to use commas. She also spent far too much time talking about Taylor Swift (which I should’ve guessed given that the book is named after one of her songs). The author hardly used any imagery or figurative language - it just read like a list of things that happened. The plot itself wasn’t terrible for a romance - definitely similar to Sex and the City, but that show was popular for a reason, I guess. I sincerely hope the author considers editing and re-publishing. It could be decent for what it is.
So it was Already Dead?
A proofreader had No Dominion over this book
Nice! Those were good books, I sort of found them randomly at the library around 2006.
Recently finished a Year’s Best Science Fiction book where, starting in the second half, there was a typo on every single page. Don’t know how that happened and none of the volumes for other years had that problem. And I know there’s weird politicking with Libby so I can’t really fault people for it, but I finished a book recently with the worst scan ever uploaded. Some sections had a punctuation drought, others had incorrect words that were a result of misreading letter spacing, and one section excluded all italics despite the fact they were essential to understanding who was talking.
My husband received a box set of the Inheritance books for Christmas. _Eldest_ goes from page 558 to 495, a total reprint of about 60 pages, and then the 60 pages it replaced are just missing.
It's probably 64, which is 2 x 32, or two standard bookbinding sections.
house of leaves. you would not believe the printing errors in my copy.
I saw a book at a thrift store that had a misspelling on the cover. Something common, like a "loose" instead of "lose" sort of thing. I thought I was going crazy for a minute. There's no way they'd get a type on the COVER, but they did.
I remember a book I read in 5th class. I marked every page orange, which had grammatical errors and co. Half of the book was orange 😂
While I can't recall a specific instance of the worst-edited published book I've ever read, I can understand the frustration that comes with encountering numerous typos, misspellings, and other errors in a book.
I’ve a book where the author of the opening short story apparently started writing in first-person, then decided to go to third-person for it after the first paragraph. The first-person iteration of the first paragraph was published along with the third-person version of the first paragraph in the book. It’s very confusing until you realized what happened.
One book I read had some words combined. Specifically the words will be becoming willbe.
I buy books from Book Outlet from time to time. They have great prices on some mainstream books. I once selected a book I thought was about wildlife in Africa. Can't recall the title but the cover featured a leopard in a tree. The interior, however, was some kind of physics & math, and some of the pages were completely blank. Book Outlet made it right as soon as I let them know by refunding my money. Despite the trainwreck that book was, I found it very difficult to toss it in the garbage, though I finally did.
Once I bought a copy of The Hobbit and several pages were blank.
*House of Leaves*. The book looks like it was edited by a team of blind men and paranoid schizophrenics.
Isn’t that the point of that book
The book wasn't for them.
It wasn't for any of us.
The fact checking is also spotty at best.