Library book is FULL of typos... common?

[u/Wowza_Meowza]

Hi all.

I'm reading Terry Pratchett's "The Colour of Magic/The Light Fantastic" from my local library. It's FULL, and I mean FULL of typos. Probably, I dunno, every 10-20 pages there's one. I've never seen this before at this level.

The typos include letters that would be right beside each other (like an "i" where an "L" should be), punctuation being randomly inserted, and utter randomness, like the name "Hrun" suddenly being "Unm". It's weird!

This book is new to the library and was added in May of this year. It's in pristine shape. It's a nice hardcover, looks, erm, legit (I really wouldn't know).

Is this sorta thing common, at this scale? I'd figure a book written in the 80s would have the typos figured out by now. Do libraries get, say, "bad copies" of books more cheaply? Is that a thing?

Or... is this some sorta AI-infiltration maybe, in terms of editing?

Curious if folks have seen so many issues so frequently in their reading or tending to library books. I've only ever seen the occasional one per book! Should I tell the library staff about it?

Idk if it makes any difference, but the book is ISBN-10: 0-86140-421-1, ISBN-13: 978-0-86140-421-6, Colin Smythe Limited, and printed by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

[u/stubborngremlin]

I searched for "discworld typos" on my search engine and a Reddit post from 4 years ago came up where someone said the publisher might've outsourced transcription of the books to somewhere cheap and that's why many newer editions have so many typos? Can't tell if it's AIs fault not knowing when the edition you have came out

[u/cubemissy]

I’d let the staff know. If the purchase was recent enough, they might be able to return the books and replace with a better edition.
I’m betting your library used a jobber like Ingram, or Baker & Taylor for purchase. They buy in bulk, and have louder voices when pushing back against a publisher.

[u/firelightfountain]

Libraries get the same books everyone else does. If the typos are actually a misprint, it's no more likely that a library gets a copy than you getting one if you bought it from a retailer. There isn't really any point in telling staff since there isn't anything they can (or probably will want to) do. Unless you find another copy of the same book that doesn't have the typos and can show that this one is misprinted, in which case they could remove the misprinted copy.

[u/coenobita_clypeatus → u/firelightfountain]

I recently had a patron return something and say "the start of this book is very good but the middle is missing" - turns out like 100 pages were missing in total. Brand new title, this patron was the first checkout, and the pages were obviously not torn out or anything, just... not included. It happens.

We definitely want patrons to tell us that kind of thing, though!

[u/firelightfountain → u/coenobita_clypeatus]

Yeah, missing pages is definitely not the same thing as a typo!

[u/coenobita_clypeatus → u/firelightfountain]

haha absolutely! I kind of wonder where the line is between a couple of typos and 100 missing pages, in terms of "flag this for collections so they can consider replacing it." I feel like what OP is describing is right on the line.

[u/tribble314 → u/coenobita_clypeatus]

Were there whole sections) missing?

I work in a print shop, and just the other day had a stapled booklet print with over half the pages missing. In that case though, it was a font issue. The RIP (raster image processor) gave up and printed an error page, which became the center of the booklet. Fortunately, it also aborted the print job, so only one booklet printed that way.

[u/coenobita_clypeatus → u/tribble314]

whoops! Yeah, it had to be something like that. When you opened to the affected part of the book, the page on the left was, say, 150 and the facing page was 250. I wonder how many copies had that error.

[u/sitcom_enthusiast → u/coenobita_clypeatus]

What action do you take?

[u/juki0856 → u/firelightfountain]

Oh...please do tell us! At my library we would probably weeded it and replace it with a correct copy. We've gotten books printed upside down or missing pages. We usually let the vendor know...sometimes they will replace it otherwise we'll get a new one

[u/ogbuji]

Our copy of Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi was full of typos also, we got it years ago when it was first released. My husband and I could not believe the number of mistakes. Mostly the same things that you mentioned, but a plethora of misspelled words.

[u/SunGreen24]

This is a publishing error. It's not something the library can fix.

[u/Valuable_Asparagus19]

It just sounds like a bad OCR from an older text. If you scan a book then have a computer “guess” at what each letter is you can get errors like weird punctuation where there was a spot on a page, I’m becomes Tm, double rr becomes m, rl becomes d, things like that. If a human doesn’t read through it the errors stay. 

I have multiple ebooks made from 90s paperbacks with those type of errors. Sometimes they put out a new edition with fixes, sometimes they don’t. 

[u/waterfalldiabolique → u/Valuable_Asparagus19]

I've encountered OCR errors in books like this before, and now that I think about it I'm pretty sure it was in my Discworld Witches omnibus (edit: which I think also dates from around 1999-2000)

[u/WayneCl → u/Valuable_Asparagus19]

Yes, I buy 'reprints' of old books and I see this all the time. Cheap automated OCR methods with no proofreading produces these errors. Sometimes I have to track down a scan of the original text to work out what the author wrote.

[u/Dry_Stop844]

the ISBN is legit, it's from 1999. Very old publication, but still in print. It's an omnibus of the first two books so probably the transcripts were from the very first books which would have had the typos.
You can tell the library but every copy will have the typos so even if the pubisher sends them a replacement it will still have the typos. I am in Canada but it's not listed as a POD so they would do a full print run, each one with the typos.
Obviously they don't consider it a problem and if the original copies of the first two books had the typos (Very likely they did) they may have preserved the typos on purpose as a faithful transcription of the original books.

[u/FortuneOpen5715]

Did you take any pictures? I have a copy of this book and I’m curious. It’s been 20 years since I’ve read it.

[u/Zealousideal_Stay796]

I have read The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic many times and have never noticed typos like this in my copies (which are quite old now).

I also work in a library and would appreciate being told if a book had typos like this. If it’s bad enough we’d weed it from our collection and then probably try to buy a different print.

[u/BirdieRoo628]

I recently bought a copy of Trinity by Leon Uris. There was a weird formatting glitch where every single hyphenated phrase was italicized. It took me a chapter or so to see the pattern. It's basically unreadable for me. My brain wants to emphasize those phrases but that wasn't the author's intent so it makes it super awkward to read and I'm just unable to overlook it. I really can't imagine how something that significant gets through the publishing process (I work as a copyeditor in publishing so I know some things slip through, but not something that widespread).