SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion
Group Reads Discussions 2011
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Hyperion Errors: Message from Agent
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Wow! Care like that makes one (ok, maybe just me) want to buy everything their selling! Haha. But really, I mean that.
I got an email from the author as well:I want to thank you for contacting me re: the low quality of transfer from hardcopy prose to e-text for your Kindle edition of Hyperion. As someone who works endless days and nights proofreading and re-proofreading text, the news made me sick. ("Oh my Cod! Cod damn it!" Ridiculous.
By now you've heard from my NY agent, Richard Curtis, who's one of the most respected agents in the business. Richard contacted the highest people at Bantam Books immediately and they admit to such errors in their "earlier editions" and have already begun a special RTF file check to correct Hyperion. (What it takes, of course, is an alert human eye and brain, such as yours.) When the top Bantam people asked Richard -- "Should we re-check the other three books in the Hyperion Cantos?" -- his answer was "Absolutely!" Such errors -- such absolute sloppiness -- damage the spell being cast by any novel and simply can't be tolerated.
Thank you again for writing to me promptly about this outrage.
Best,
Dan Simmons
Damn, that's just really cool.
Points to Dan Simmons and his agent for stepping up and responding.
Points to Dan Simmons and his agent for stepping up and responding.
No doubt. That is great stuff. Thanks for caring so much Dan and Richard.
Good job on your part in fixing the kindle awfulness. I got irritated trying to decipher it and went and got the book from the library.
I had the same problems in the Kindle version of
. Unfortunately, he's dead, so there's nobody to tell the publisher to fix it.
But now I can't buy the kindle edition for my reread! Have to finish Towers of Midnight first anyway, which I just started yesterday, so maybe they will be quick enough, or maybe I will make an exception and go back to my paper book.
Just downloaded the sample from Amazon - lots of Gods in it, no Cods, so they seem to have fixed it really fast!
I just came across another one where it says "it's a lot easier being Wound people I know..." Yep "Wound" instead of "around" complete with the capital W.The good thing is ebook versions are easy to correct. Imagine having lots of errors in a print edition!
It's great that he replied so quickly.... I'll wait for it to get fixed before I buy a copy for my Kindle! :)
Dan Simmons is a wonderful writer, and this type of attention to detail and his readership is amazing. It is very truly appreciated. This book was my first great Sci Fi love, read when I was a teen. Yes, I have just figured out how old I am. I think I will re-read it with you all now. I have probably forgotten enough of it now, somehow, that it will again be the most utterly enjoyable thing ever.
Rachel wrote: "It's great that he replied so quickly.... I'll wait for it to get fixed before I buy a copy for my Kindle! :)"It appeared to have been fixed as of yesterday - see my post above.
Charlotte wrote: "Rachel wrote: "It's great that he replied so quickly.... I'll wait for it to get fixed before I buy a copy for my Kindle! :)"It appeared to have been fixed as of yesterday - see my post above."
Have you looked at the full file, or just the sample? The current file is still supposedly from January 12, 2011, according to it's Amazon page.
Cindy wrote: "Charlotte wrote: "Rachel wrote: "It's great that he replied so quickly.... I'll wait for it to get fixed before I buy a copy for my Kindle! :)"It appeared to have been fixed as of yesterday - see ..."
I only checked the sample. Lara, can you tell us if the God/Cod transposition is there at the beginning of the book? i.e. if the error is not in the sample can we assume it has been fixed? Don't know if I would trust the date on the page as an indication. If it isn't fixed, then it also has not yet been taken down!
I came across it in The Priest's tale. I haven't found it in later chapters. Though I have found other errors, just none as funny.
The sample includes the Prologue and the first few pages (locations 491-571) of the priests tale. Did "Cod" appear in the title and this first part of the chapter?
Somehow I managed to buy Hyperion - thought I just looked at it but when I turned my wireless on last night it downloaded - purchase date Feb 3. It has two "cod"s in it, so it either has not been corrected or not very well corrected!
I really love Dan Simmons as a writer and this makes me love him even more!
Try turning that into an audio. My Alex voice would say "cod" now and then. It's hilarious.
Any updates on this? Can anyone confirm or deny that corrections have been made to the Kindle edition?I was all ready to buy this book and was excited to start reading until I found several posts like this about the errors in the book. Still holding off my purchase until it's been fixed.
When my publisher was working my manuscript, we went over it several times, each time catching errors we missed. I am sure we missed a couple here and there, but we really gave it the time it deserved given that people were going to put down real money for the product.We talked about this alot during the process. It is a fact that books often have errors in them, even the best edited manuscripts. However, it seems like the number of errors in publications has grown over time. I do not believe that the large publishers take near the care they used to. It seems more important to them to push product out quickly. Unfortunately, this also leads to more formulaic writing, smething I am trying to avoid.
Most of the errors are appearing in the e-book version and not in the paper ones though.
So when it comes to the big publishers, I don't think it's a lack or lessening of care taken as much as it is a problem in their process of transferring a book to an electronic medium.
Whatever it is they are doing, it is being done wrong. :P
So when it comes to the big publishers, I don't think it's a lack or lessening of care taken as much as it is a problem in their process of transferring a book to an electronic medium.
Whatever it is they are doing, it is being done wrong. :P
The truly egregious errors I have seen have primarily been for older books for which the electronic files may be difficult to find or recover in a version usable in current software levels (or never existed if the book was published prior to electronic typesetting). These books are most likely being made into e-books by scanning the pages and processing them with OCR (optical character recognition) software. OCR applications are a quick way to get a bunch of paper data into an electronic file, but they are prone to error, and I'm guessing that the errors are not getting caught because publishers are not willing to re-proofread something that may (with luck) sell a few hundred, maybe a few thousand copies at well under $10. They wouldn't even make back the wages of the proofer on something that sells at $.99... let alone the freebie promotions! not saying this is right, but I can kind of see how this stuff gets out is such poor shape if I look at it with $$ colored glasses on...
I got this email today:Thanks so much for alerting Dan to this problem. He passed the word along to us, and we fixed it. Sadly, the easiest way to create e-books from older books that have no digital files is to scan them in, and that scanning can occasionally lead to errors. But once we are alerted by kind readers such as yourself that the scanning did indeed cause glitches, we can have the book pulled and fixed. So thank you again!
All the books in the series save Endymion are now fixed and are available, and Endymion should be back out in a few weeks, likewise all tidied up. I am told that if you contact Amazon about this, they will send you the corrected files gratis to replace any bad files you previously purchased.
Yours,
-- Anne
Anne Lesley Groell
Senior Editor
Random House, Inc.
That took rather longer than expected, what?
Dear Lara,
Richard Curtis here, Dan Simmons' literary agent. We were both appalled by the information you provided about the horrendous proofreading (or complete lack of it) in the Kindle edition of Hyperion, and we appreciate your bringing it to our attention. We have contacted the publisher and asked them to take the file down, proofread it and put a clean file back up. We also asked them to review the files of the other books in the Hyperion trilogy. And we told them to make sure you get a fresh copy when they've corrected the files.
I'm sure you know that Dan is fanatic about clean copy, so you can imagine how upset this made him. We have asked that the situation be rectified at once.
Again, thank you.
Richard Curtis