109,263
 

109,263
Read the article here

Kind of weirdly hyped article. There are six books submitted. One book accounts for 80% of errors. Total errors in all six books are 5 times amount of last year.

That means that the other five books had essentially the same rate of error as the previous year. So another way to report that story would be "one math textbook publisher is really bad at copyediting, others are average."

But the way the article is worded will most assuredly result in more people reading it.

I think it would be more appropriate to say that while one math textbook publisher is really bad at copyediting, he is very good at something else, like crossword puzzles or another skill. You know, just to build up his confidence.

In 8th grade we had a book that averaged about 2 errors per chapter (at least, we caught about 2 errors per chapter, who knows how many there were). We compiled a list of them and sent them to the publisher at the end of the year. When the new edition came out, we went through and looked, and if I remember correctly we found several of the same errors.

No wonder math was my most difficult subject.

I wonder how many of the errors were informational and how many were typographical.

Back in college one of my professors used the new unpublished version of his book as the class text. It has been through the editorial process with him and his publisher, including copyediting and his review of galley proofs. He offered us $.25 for the first report of a typo and $1 for the first report of any factual error and by the end of the quarter we found something like 2000 errors in total but only about 30 factual errors.

And then there's the question (and I know I'm taking this way too seriously for what was essentially a "isn't the world silly stupid sometimes" story) of counting methodology. Say they did a last minute edit to the Chapter 12 introduction, shortening it by one page but failed to refresh the index so now half of all the index references are off by one page. Is that 1 error or 873?

Well, from a printer's perspective, it would be 873. Because that is how many changes we would have to make.

Speaking from experience as we just had to deal with this recently (although in this case, it only affected 7 pages because that was how long the index was).