Following my complaints about typos and howlers in the Alexander Kent series of naval history novels, publishers Random House have now withdrawn the titles from sale while they review the text and fix the errors. This, say say, should take a few days.
In a full response, Random House say that mine is the first complaint they have received about the Kent series, but they welcome the feedback: “It is of the utmost importance for us to get this feedback so we can ensure that our customers have the best possible ebook experience. We really want to avoid a situation where some customers have a bad experience that puts them off ebooks in general.”
“As you are aware,’ they continue, “the entire publishing industry is rapidly expanding the list of titles available as ebooks and many thousands of titles have been made available and, although we do have QA procedures in place it is inevitable some errors may creep in, especially with older titles than need to be scanned.”
I welcome the response and I hope that my highlighting of the problem will cause all publishers to ensure that their scanned offerings are thoroughly proofread (by a human being, if possible) before they are released to the buying public. The good thing is that people who have bought error-riddled books are in a good position to ask for a new download of the corrected versions when they appear. With the Kindle Store, where Amazon retain control of the material, I suspect such upgrades will happen automatically. With other reader systems, such as the Sony Reader, it will be necessary for the user to initiate the download of the corrected version.