There's a fire!

joshishollywood:

Let’s just say you have a Coke bottle, but what’s in that Coke bottle tastes, smells, looks, and thus quite clearly is Sprite.

Why would you insist that what you’re dealing with is Coke and can’t possibly be anything else?

And I mean, even if you don’t subscribe to the…

(Source: badcgijosh)

bibliofeminista:

Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing, they explained, most publishers employed battalions of full-time copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes. Now, they are gone.

There is also “pressure to publish more books more quickly than ever,” an editor at a major publishing house explained. Many publishers now skip steps. “In the past, you really readied the book in several discrete stages,” Paul Elie, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, explained. “Manuscript, galley proofs, revised proofs, blue lines. You marked your changes at each stage, and then the compositor incorporated them and sent you the next stage. Now there are intermediate stages; authors will e-mail in ‘one last correction,’ or we’ll produce intermediate stages of proof — the text is fluid, in motion, and this leads to typos.”

Authors, too, bear some blame for the typo explosion. As Geoff Shandler, the editor in chief of Little, Brown and Company, told me, “Use of the word processor has resulted in a substantial decline in author discipline and attention. Manuscripts are much longer than they were 25 years ago, much more casually assembled, and beyond spell check (and not even then; and of course it will miss typos if the word is a word) it is amazing how little review seems to have occurred before the text is sent to the editor. Seriously, you have no idea how sloppy some of these things are.”

None of this is really news, but it is good to remember the importance of copyeditors.

:( I know for a fact that a lot of good people work at our local branch, because I spent the best 6 months of my work-life as a barista in the Seattle’s Best Coffee there. How is it possible to live without a book store within a 10-minute drive??? Major bummer.

(Source: reading-is-fun)