A passion for books but not proofreading
Yesterday I received an email from AbeBooks which stated that I could save 48% on Stephan King’s Duma Key.
Stephan King? It seems that Abe’s ‘Passion for Books’ doesn’t extend to proofreading. Maybe I’m being overly critical but this is a company in the business of words, books and literature! You’d think that they’d go to greater lengths to ensure these types of errors didn’t occur. What would happen if TechCrunch had a headline that read ‘Steve Jubs predicts iPod success’?
I’d give AbeBooks a mulligan but they used that up a few years ago when they sent a message to their booksellers and accidentally referred to them as boobsellers. A very different business for sure.
Perhaps the AbeBooks tagline should be ‘Passion for ARCs‘ which notoriously have these types of errors. Or is my criticism too harsh?
March 28th, 2008 at 11:13 am
A little proofreading needed on your own site. Under pages in the right column: Barnes & Who? In your defense, transposing letters is a common error on the keyboard. Abe has no excuse for “Stephan.” No typo there, just ignorance from a site that should know better.
March 28th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Good eye cw - but take a look at that page first. It’s actually an intentional typo on my part which allows me to take advantage of a common misspelling.
April 23rd, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Careful. Not too far below from your piece on Abe, you have a review that mentions “the foreward” in A Confederacy of Dunces. A foreward?
April 27th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Ha-ha, great catch B! THAT is a typo which will now be corrected.
May 24th, 2009 at 9:58 am
[…] going to damage your brand in the long run unless they become routine. I’ve been critical of typos from Abebooks because I saw a pattern of errors. That, and subject line errors are the easiest ones to catch. […]