Yes, but current (commercial) books have many more errors than books published years ago, apparently as a result of a lot less editing, copyediting, and other goings over than used to be done.
Don't you believe it. Publishers have always had variable text quality from year to year or decade to decade, and even a publisher that generally has clean text can publish an aberrant book wherein Bad Things Happen.
Sometimes there are periods where one or another aspect of text production suffers a drop in quality. The advent of computerized phototypesetting in the mid to late 70s swept away the typographically experienced linotypists. The same thing happened when desktop imaging cut the feet out from under dedicated typesetting systems like Alphatype and Compugraphic. Both times, fine points like ligatured forms and the correct use of en-dashes became noticeably less reliable for a few years. When everyone started writing on computers instead of typewriters, we had a siege of typos generated by people not understanding how to use spellcheckers properly.
What you haven't seen unless you worked in publishing: technological change and consolidation in the typesetting industry. You may think publishers ought to have fully corrected etexts of their published books, but there are easily a dozen different technological discontinuities that can have messed that up.
When printers switched over to monitoring printing and binding procedures via electronic sensors rather than human beings, the incidence of miscollated books spiked for a while. That was fun (not).
Self-publishing and micropresses produced a lot of bad text. They also produced books set up by people who don't know what frontmatter is, or how to design a standard book page.
The speed at which publishers have been having to convert hardcopy titles to ebooks has generated a whole new set of technical problems not previously seen on earth or in heaven. As usual, everyone's scrambling to sort things out and get their procedures cleaned up.
What hasn't changed: real publishers still edit, copy edit, proofread, and slug their books.
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Note:
There is one variety of grammatical error that's on the upswing: past-tense irregular verbs. Apparently schools stopped drilling students on them a while back, so we're now seeing otherwise literate people who can't sort out arise/arose/arisen, break/broke/broken, choose/chose/chosen, draw/drew/drawn, eat/ate/eaten, freeze/froze/frozen, grow/grew/grown, hide/hid/hidden, and so forth.
In my experience, sometimes a correction at the copyedit stage can break a word elsewhere. For example, a change in a noun can require a change to a verb later in the sentence. If it's a long, complex sentence, it can be missed.
So, it's not that the writer wrote it wrong. One piece of the sentence was upgraded, and the other half not upgraded to match.
There's always a chance of introducing a new error when you make a correction, but that most commonly happens when the typesetter is working on it.
It's kind of you to make excuses for errors, but a freelance copy editor who messed up with partially-changed sentences more than once or twice a book would be in danger of not getting used again.
Better to get it all right, of course, but at the micro-stage of sweating over teeny-tiny things, this can happen. And then, there is just the last pass of the proofreader.
True.
For extra swank, you can refer to the proofreading pass where you double-check the proofreading corrections as slugging or the slugging pass.
I suspect that obvious errors in well-edited books happen that way more often than that they were written wrong originally and nobody in the chain ever noticed.
Well.
Over the years, I've worked every position along that pipeline. The more I see, the less certain I am that I can diagnose how an error happened by looking at a printed copy. For instance, really blatant errors that you'd think everyone would notice might in fact have been noticed by everyone, but the author point-blank refused corrections every time they were offered.
Or maybe the book is by a protege of a famous author who doesn't allow anything beyond the most nominal copy editing on his book. The famous author has a rock-solid prose style. The protege could have really used more editing, but since they're under the aegis of the famous author, their book gets the same treatment his books do, with ugly results.
Or an earlier unedited version of the manuscript somehow gets transmitted for typesetting, the author isn't particularly concerned about the proofreading because the book was thrashed to a fare-thee-well during editing and copy editing, and anyway the author is dyslexic; so no one notices until way too close to publication date.
Or the copy editor is a dimwit and does a terrible job, so the editor and author have to laboriously go through and fix all the ill-advised corrections. Unfortunately, the production editor sends the copy editor's original stylesheet to the proofreader, who laboriously reinstates all the errors.
Or there's some baroque technical glitch in the typesetting system that manifests itself when they're printing out the last signed-off-on fully-corrected pages that go to the printer.
Or electronic copy editing happened. That's another area where we're seeing a whole new set of mishaps.
Or something else happens. I could give you ten or twenty more scenarios without breaking a sweat. At this point in my career, I won't say for certain what happened to a text, certainly not whose fault it was, unless I've seen every stage of production.
I've winced more than once at an error in a book I worked on in production that made it to publication.
It's not that big a deal for a couple of tiny errors, though it's always upsetting to me when I'm responsible.
Same here. Every one of them stings.
Now, if we're talking Laurell K. Hamilton levels of error, that's a big deal.
Ye flipping ghods. If my books were that bad, I think I'd look for another line of work.
My guess is that she can still be edited to some extent, but can no longer be held to a firm delivery date. If an author's big enough, there's so much stuff happening that's timed to the publication date that the new book can't be rescheduled for anything short of a catastrophe. Late delivery eats up all the available editorial time, and leaves no margin of error if you've got a bad copy editor, proofreader, or typesetter.
Sometimes an author will change their editor or publisher, or break up with their significant other, or get successful enough to really push a deadline, and suddenly you'll see in print what their manuscripts have looked like all along.
There's some vague "number of errors" that when exceeded in any one book it becomes a big deal.
The one I'm familiar with happens if the author makes too many editorial changes after the book is typeset, when they should have been made during editing or copy editing. If the cost of making those changes exceeds the cost of first-pass typesetting for the entire book, they're all charged to the author.
...Also, it has innumerable sentence fragments, and from how many such fragments I've seen elsewhere, they're apparently becoming acceptable by the reading public.
That process has been going on for a long time. It's the usual rule: if you can make sentence fragments work for you, they're fine. If not, your writing will cease to be anyone's problem but your own.
Yeah, that was a publisher screw up.
Those are absolutely heartbreaking for an author who has diligently gone through the galleys and made corrections.
At which point then some over-zealous semi-literate gets would-be editor hands on the ms. and screws it over. Post the author's galley responses there should be no changes at all to a mss.
That's a good principle, though in practice there's seldom time to let the author see the slugging pass.
No book is good enough to withstand the evil power of an over-zealous semi-literate would-be editor. They break a lot of authors as well.