Hot DTP book on Amazon

[Steve Rindsberg]

Googling DTP Forum coughed this up:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1566090644/thomhartmann/ref%3Dnosim/103-2300579-0112602

Price is a bit stiff, though ...

[ktinkel]

Googling DTP Forum coughed this up:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1566090644/thomhartmann/ref%3Dnosim/103-2300579-0112602

Price is a bit stiff, though ...Oh, gee. $3?!!!

I’ve got a stack of them, including one signed by one Steve Rindsberg (that I was supposed to pass around).

Think that one might fetch more? Say, $4?

[fhaber]

Bought it.

[annc]

Bought it.Well done, Frank. I still use mine, which was available even way down here, in mainstream bookshops when it was first published.

[Steve Rindsberg]

$1.95

The thing's been marred. ;-)

[Franca]

Abused, blighted, tarnished, defiled. Didn't teacher tell you never to scribble in books? Shameful. ;-)

[Steve Rindsberg]

They always did teach that. Then in college they said we should underline and highlight and do all kind of other things to books. I could never get used to that, but I've fallen into the habit of scribbling abusive marginal notes to authors who make blatant mistakes in computer documentation.

[Franca]

Hm. Students did all that highlighting and stuff in college but I never heard a professor suggest it. Never seemed right to me, not in a hardbound book, anyway. I don't feel quite so kindly towards paperbacks, especially these days. Nobody seems to proofread them any more and they fall apart before you've finished reading the book. Sometimes I amuse myself by marking all the typos.

[annc]

Hm. Students did all that highlighting and stuff in college but I never heard a professor suggest it. Never seemed right to me, not in a hardbound book, anyway. I don't feel quite so kindly towards paperbacks, especially these days. Nobody seems to proofread them any more and they fall apart before you've finished reading the book. Sometimes I amuse myself by marking all the typos.The first time I was ever encouraged to highlight or underline in books was when I went to work for a large company that had an in-house training department. The first course I went to was conducted by the training manager himself, and my face must have registered horror, because he said, 'Librarians are exempt, of course'.

[Molly/CA]

I think it's not lack of proofreading but machine proofreading (and I don't absolve the authors' spellcheckers, either!) supplying those amusing homonyms.

And where the chore comes under copy editing rather than proofreading, we've been tormented by an illiterate and totally incompetent copy editor for three years now --from the now defunct Impressions Journal Services. Defunct as such, the old URL takes you to a different company that seems to perform some of the same services. The Press that's supposedly publishing my husband's book sent us a note that said Impressions was in financial trouble and was "offshoring" its copy editing. This is a mind-boggling thought indeed, to anyone who's tried to deal with, say, CS "customer service" lately!

The Press also assured us that their level of service would remain the same as they were re-hiring the people they've been working this as freelancers. So we can look forward to another x years of correcting the copy editors' insertion of blatant grammar and capitalization errors. Perhaps someone beat us to it in reporting direct to the president of the former company?

Back to the original point, our experience suggests that the problem is not LACK OF proofreading--- far from it!

Jane Langton has a marvelous take-off on a letter from a publisher in "The Face on the Wall" (perhaps "in the Wall").