Whither the Copy Editors?

Maybe I'm being too picky, but it seems to me that lately, books have more and more typos and formatting errors in them.

Everyone makes typos. In my case, by the time I get to the end of a single paragraph, the chances I'll screw something up reach unity. And it's not like typos and spelling errors haven't always made their way into print.

But I remember a time when stumbling across a mistake was a rare occurrence. When finding one was almost an "Ah-ha!" moment. When I might read for a month before noticing a missing letter, or a misplaced punctuation mark.

Not so any more. This past week I found rampant errors in three different novels, and that's just this week. Furthermore, the nature of the errors seem to be getting worse. Not just a mispelling or two. In one book, I saw an italicized word in one paragraph, with an underlined word in the next. Later in the same novel, a word was both italicized and underlined. Another problem I've noticed cropping up with increasing frequency is paragraphs with no indention, and improper typesetter's quotation marks. And these aren't author's mistakes, a mispelling or typo making it from manuscript to printed page -- it's someone missing a formatting change in Quark Xpress, and no one noticing downstream between layout and press.

I presume part of the problem stems from the fact many, if not all, manuscripts are delivered to publishers in digital form. We ZIP up the Microsoft Word doc and email it off, nits and all. From there, it gets poured into a Quark doc or maybe Frame (or have publishers started using InDesign?). I know people read the draft layouts (including the authors), and I'm sure errors get caught and fixed along the way. But at the same time, our reliance on the digital workflow probably means we gloss over steps in the process that once got more attention.

Computers are "smart" after all. A lot of word processors even have a feature called "smart quotes." We trust them to not fuck things up. But there's smart and there's intelligent. I've often noticed Microsoft Word, for instance, thinks it's smarter than me, making decisions about formatting as I type that often befuddle the hell outa me. I try to take charge of the bastard, but it hangs on to its internal default stylesheets with a death grip. Some of the weirdnesses I see in print, in fact, I attribute to how fucking smart Microsoft Word thinks it is -- but isn't. (Myself, I don't actually write in Word. I hate it. But I have it on hand to transfer final manuscripts into Word format before I ZIP and email them.)

In the old days, a manuscript would arrive typed. Editorial would happen on the manuscript and only when it was ready did it go to the typesetter, whose job it was to set the entire book, using proper marks, etc. I've known a couple of typesetters -- a job that's basically dead, except for the rare specialty press that has an old Linotype machine still functioning. Typesetters were craftspeople. And I think the work they did is starting to be missed, in terms of the quality printed work. They served as one more set of eyes in the design of the book, and they had pride in their work.

No doubt it all comes down to money. I know only a smidgen of what goes on inside the publishing process, but I know that every step costs money. And these days, every step probably costs inordinately more money than it once did. There's probably more pressure on everyone involved to keep costs down in their little piece of the pie. In my day job, I work in graphic design, and I know first hand what it means to feel cost pressure compromise quality.

But understanding why it's happening doesn't make me any less sad that these little errors are becoming more common. I feel like something important is being left behind.