Thursday, February 17, 2005

What's With TOR Paperbacks?

I've just finished reading Scott Westerfeld's Succession duology, Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds. I read them both in paperback, published by TOR in the US, and I wasn't exactly happy with the quality of the typesetting.

Both books in the series were filled with typographical errors and obvious bad spell-checking. You know those words that are real words, and so aren't picked up in a spell-check, but are horribly out of context in the wrong place? Lots of those.

But the worst problem seemed to be the hyphenation! It was all over the place. In the middle of sentences that were nowhere near a line-end or page-end. Words such as reconstructions with the "re-" bit on the last line of a page and then "constructions" on the next page... haven't they heard of kerning!? They could have easily spaced the last line a little more and forced the entire word onto the next page, improving readability.

I noticed this problem previously with John C.Wright's Golden Age trilogy, also from TOR, and probably the best SF I have read in many years. Those texts were also a mess.

This has very little to do with the author. I enjoyed both authors very much, but it looks sloppy. It indicates a lack of care in production that I think it is insulting to the author. Or maybe it is just laziness on the part of TOR's editors?

I hope they improve the quality of their paperbacks soon, because they have some really great authors. I'd hate to not enjoy an author because an Editor can't be bothered to do their job well.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Editors aren't proofreaders. They aren't the people who check the typeset pages for errors. Proofreaders are freelancers hired on a book-by-book basis, and they're hired by the Production rather than the Editorial department.

Editors are even more distant from the process of turning hardcover books into paperbacks. Depending on the production method used, they may not even see the paperback pages before the mass-market edition comes out.

If you're looking at a hardcover-to-paperback converstion that has problems with bad breaks, fossil line-end hyphens, and lots of widows and orphans, odds are there's been some kind of technical glitch in the text conversion process. There may also have been a problem with the proofreading.

Those are things that need looking into; no question about it. But they have nothing to do with the publisher's attitude toward that author, or the care and attention the editor gave that book.

(Scott Westerfeld's editor cares a great deal about his books. So do we all.)

I've been in the industry a while now. I've worked in Editorial, I've worked in Production, I've even been a typesetter. I know a lot about the odd things that can happen to a book, and I've seen some unlikely stories play out. What experience has taught me is that it's very hard to say for certain whose fault a given error is, if all you have to work from is a finished copy of the book.

If the book contains multiple errors that fall into a pattern, it may be easier to diagnose. I once saw a book -- printed, bound, and shipped, alas -- where almost every word in a half-page-long passage had had an incorrect letter substituted for a correct one, and the incorrect letters were all four places removed in the ASCII sequence from the letters they replaced.

It looked like hell, but it wasn't the result of lazy editing or sloppy proofreading. It was a glitch in the typesetting company's computers, and it had struck while the typesetters were outputting the final repro versions of the pages. If you'd spotted the errors but not their pattern, you might have incorrectly assumed that the publisher hadn't bothered to correct them, when in fact they'd been introduced after all the rounds of checking and correcting were done.

Another book I once saw contained a number of pesky little factual/logical errors, small but irritating, that were exactly the sort of thing editors and copyeditors are supposed to catch. I might have dismissed it as sloppy work, if I hadn't happened to known that the book had a first-rate copyeditor.

On investigation, I found that the editor, copyeditor, production editor, proofreader, and slugger had all spotted the same errors I had. Why hadn't they been corrected? Because the author, much respected but increasingly old and frail, had dug in his heels and absolutely insisted that those bits were correct as written. So, okay. In the end, it's the author's book. It went to press with the errors intact.

I won't say "you never know," because sometimes you do; but stranger things can happen during text production than you might guess.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden

AShR said...

Teresa and Patrick, thank you so much for your thoughts on this, and for correcting me where I was wrong.

I did mention that indicated a 'lack of care in production' before I started my rant about Editors. So, my apologies for dragging the Editors into it.

Either way, it seems to have been a common problem with the last 5 TOR paperbacks I have read (3 by John C.Wright and 2 by Scott Westerfeld). I really loved them all, but the hyphenation, page breaks etc, were very good at distracting me from the story.

I would guess you are right, and it is a problem with conversion from Hardcover to Paperback.

I do understand, because I am a typesetter, how difficult finding these sort of bugs can be. The last issue of Aurealis was proofread, and checked, double and triple checked! But the minute my final copy arrived I found two errors I had missed in the first ten minutes!

But still, it does indicate to me a lack of care somewhere down the line at TOR. And I still enjoyed my rant :)

Anonymous said...

"I hope they improve the quality of their paperback's soon, because they have some really great authors."

Did you add that apostrophe in "paperbacks" just to demonstrate how insidious typoes are?

AShR said...

I'm not to worried about typos in my blog, I type fast and often don't even re-read what I have written.

A commercial publication is a different matter though, I think.