I’ve spent the past 30 years as a freelance copy editor for nonfiction books and other documents, and have worked for dozens of publishers. The short answer to the question of errors that make it into the published book is that publishers don’t want to pay for quality.

Many tasks in the life of a manuscript are now handled by freelancers, and in some cases every step except project management is outsourced. So that’s one issue, that managers might not have access to the best copy editor out there. But another issue is that good copy editors—like me!—get tired of doing what amounts to pro bono work: when publishers pay very low project/page rates, they’ll get lower-quality work. When I accept work from publishers who pay a low rate, I read it only once then skim once more quickly. It’s far from ideal, and leaves lots of bugs no doubt, but it’s what they’re willing to pay for.

On the other hand, I have other clients who pay by the hour, and tell me to spend as much time as needed to catch every error. With those clients I read three or sometimes four times, and very few errors slip by me.

It’s because the publishing industry has been cost cutting incredibly hard, mostly by not replacing the people who leave in the modern heavy crunch era. I imagine these example books were edited by one person in one day. Small presses are starting to outsource work at this point. If you’re lucky and courting the big time publishers, you’ve still got an editor with 5 books for a fiscal quarter.

Typos are common. Even with multiple revisions and proofreaders, mistakes slip through.

Some typos are common, yes, but I've only noticed a ton in books that seemed more poorly written to begin with

It's next to impossible to have an error-free book. There're too many people and steps involved where errors can be introduced into the process. Famously, the KJV Bible had typos, and there were plenty of scholars checking it. I find typos, missed punctuation, in most every book I read, more so with books published since the '90's. I think publishers are less concerned about editing these days, and then there're the self-publishers.

one of my theories is that it is how they trace pirated copies. have different versions of different mistakes and see which ones wind up being shared, there is your piracy source. but that's just a tinfoil hat theory.

I’ve noticed this recently too! I got a new copy of the book Jurassic Park and there are some typos so bad that I just couldn’t figure out what was trying to me conveyed.

It inspired me to dig through some old boxes in the attic to find my hard cover copy that I got in the 90s and the typos are not in the original one! Somehow a book printed more than 20 years after the original edition has more typos in it!

I just hate it when I see historical errors. In Firefly Summer by Maeve Binchy she writes a bar scene where everyone will remember November 23rd as the day President John F kennedybdies. He died on 11/22 not 11/23.

I began professionally reviewing books in the early 80s. Over the years I have seen a steady decline in the quality of both orthography and proof-reading. At least one book, privately printed, was almost unreadable because of it.

Part of the problem is that costs are rising and often proofing can be air tasked or subbed out to freelancers, who don't have the experience, but are cheap.

At the very least, no book should have any error other than grammar or 'literals' (words spelled correctly, but the wrong word - their for there and so on) now we have spell-checkers.

But often, and increasingly, that's not true.

Just another reason to love old books.

I work in a library, and we just got 3 copies of a new true-crime book from a major publisher that has a typo on the main title page. 😬

I read on the Kindle and have noticed numerous typos in numerous books. I assumed that these amount of typos were specific to kindle versions but I guess not.

It's common for books to have typos. But I read somewhere that the rule is one typo is accepted per 10,000 words. Basically, if every chapter has typos, someone had a bad editor or proofreader.

Psycho by Robert Blotch has ''should of'' and ''could of'' a few times.

Editors seem to be a thing of the past. If you don't believe me just read anything - books, magazines, news.

It tends to happen more with fantasy, which are the books you've included. Why?
Well, because the list of unrecognized words in a fantasy book is WAY LONGER than the list of unrecognized words in an autobiography. So, you can't really use a quick spell check as easily.

Heck, some books like Mieville's Kraken are written in such an esoteric style, I don't even know if you'd recognize an error.

Sometimes Typos will have something hidden.

In OG Ready Player One each misplaced letter if put in a string gave you a website that brought you to an AR game, that eventually took you to a retro arcade on one date. Whoever won the retro gaming competition won a Delorian.

As an avid reader for (consults a calculator) 66 years, I can tell you that yes, the frequency of typos has indeed increased. Greatly.

I recently read a book that had been re-released by the author because he was angry with what editors had previously done to his story, as he explained in a long preface. Well, that book read like it had been written for an 8th grade writing class. Authors should not edit their own work for the same reasons programmers don't do QA for their own code.

Editing has gone to pot since the late '90s.

Everytime I see one, I feel like I should be an editor.

Newspapers also

It's not uncommon for a big book to have one. But most books that have them frequently are either poorly edited or poorly written. Or both.

The few editors I've talked to in person never got enough time to comb through everything properly. Plus not every editor is created equal, be it because of their specialty or skills.

There are books that get more time and attention, a whole team of the best editors and betas going several rounds using fancy software and their best judgement. But more books are published than ever, sell in relatively low numbers, and more and more of the publishing process is relegated to the author (even if you don't self publish), so sometimes it's one exhausted intern with barely enough time to read the whole thing.

It’s very common. I’ve never understood why and am still surprised every time I come across a misspelling or grammatical error. Seems like that all should be automated by now.

I read a lot, and for traditionally published books, 3 or 4 small errors per book feels normal and acceptable. Any more than that and my eyebrows start to go up.

In my experience, some indie books are exceptionally well edited, and some are not. Many popular authors fall in the latter category, and I have to assume that readers love their stories so much they’re willing to overlook subpar editing.

One or two is common, but I've noticed books published in the last few years blatantly failing to follow basic style guides. I read one book that never had a space after an ellipsis and another that didn't italicize foreign words.

Sub-editors. They all got fired. They were the ones doing the work. Editor is an exec position in publishing firms. This is also the reason why online news sites suck. Subbies used to re-write articles to make them readable.

I've noticed typos in books converted between .pdf and print. I assume some OCR is used which reads the wrong letters and the editors miss it during the proofread.

I read a book that was so badly proofed that the wrong character’s name was used in a scene. The man, “Al,” was talking to a woman, “Barb,” and during the conversation “Carol” replied to Al. I had to reread the passage several times because Carol wasn’t even in the house, and I was totally confused.I finally figured out that the author meant to write Barb but wrote Carol by mistake, and no one caught it. That’s the worst typo I ever found.

I’ve noticed a lot more too. Some of them are so bad I almost felt like editing and mailing the copy back to the publisher and letting them know this is how to edit a book.

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I would rather have typos than pages smeared with ink so badly you can’t read it. I’ve had both, especially frequently in the last few years. It does seem more common.

Online on translated books its not rare yeah

Most books I've read don't have many typos. Any book I have read that has been translated to English though.... Typos all over. Even in the "good" translations.

Are they all from the same publisher?

Yeah, the publishers are under intense pressure to get the books in the stores and they rush. That's when things get missed.

Typos happen, but they are definitely not common enough that you should be picking some out in every book you read.

It of course occurs a lot more with self published books.

Another cause could be a bad OCR scan for ebooks.

Caught a couple in The Expanse, a major sci fi series from a mainstream publisher that definitely would’ve had a professional edit or two done to it.

Even Stephen King said a couple get through in his works. One example was how he accidentally said the cast went ‘peasant hunting’ and it somehow got through all elements of the editing process.

Mass market game and movie tie-ins in particular have deadlines that have to be out the door at a certain date.

I was reading a copy of Mary Barton recently that on several pages just had random dashes, commas, brackets, slashes etc throughout. Don’t know how that sort of blatant error makes it through.

It all depends on how much time/money was spent. If it's a cheap product that was rushed, sure, there are going to be more errors. I always expect to find at least one or two in any book I read, if I'm honest, and it doesn't bother me too much, but any more would get annoying.

There has only ever been one book that I returned because the formatting and general polish was just unacceptable; a kindle version of one of Terry Pratchett's books, of all titles, and I think they did a complete recall at the time.

I usually find like 2 or 3 typos in each book I read.

But lately I’ve been listening to audiobooks so it’s harder to tell.

I wonder if someone has mispronounced any words…. ? I’ll have to pay closer attention.

honestly i have to say ulysses (james joyce) is pretty riddled with typos lol

Typos are common but it varies a lot. In some books I don't find a single in one, but in one fairly recent first edition novel I found dozens before I stopped counting. For example the author/editor/proofreader had a tendency to confuse b and h.

Back in the day, my friend Spike MacPhee started re-editing what he called Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Typos. There were dozens upon dozens of them.

I see it so much as well, and it's really frustrating. But it's not really one person's fault, I'm sure editors are more than qualified to find these mistakes, they just don't have the time because they're pushed too hard for work

I find typos all the time. Apparently if u inform them they might send u a free revised version as Thk u for helping them catch it

One issue as an editor is bad spellcheckers. When a processor or editing software's spellcheck flags half the words as wrong, you end up missing a few. It gets evenore frustrating when the program doesn't save your additions to its dictionary. I used to run article edits through Scrivener until I ran into one occasion where Scrivener insisted that the words "obsessive" and "denialist" didn't exist. It doesn't explain all typos, but it is a reason that gets brought up in writing circles sometimes.

And just now my phone fought me against "denialist" while not catching my initial misspelling of the word "wrong."

My copy of All the Light We Cannot See has a typo in it and that novel won a Pulitzer. I bought my copy 8 years ago years after it came out so I don’t know why they haven’t edited it out by now

I also recently read a pretty fun queer YA novel that was great except it was choc full of errors that made it kind of infuriating to read at times

maybe You should be a professional proofreader, lots of work around correcting other peoples mastakes.