I came across this lovely story today about a rather fun typo in the B & N Nook version of Tolstoy’s mammoth book, War and Peace.
Philip, of the of the Ocracoke Island Journal, decided it was time to finally work his way through War and Peace, and as it is such a physically enormous book, he decided to go with an ebook version, and as he owned a Nook, he bought a copy from B & N’s ebook store, and set to with happy anticipation to read this epic story of the war between Russia and France.
He was happily reading away until he came across this sentence:-
“It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern….”
This pulled him up short, well it would, wouldn’t it? But he assumed that it was a simple typo, and carried on. Unfortunately he then came across the same intrusive “nook” word a couple more times, and at that point gave up his attempt to enjoy his ebook, and wrote an infuriated post on his blog (link below) instead.
Apparently what had happened was that this particular version of War and Peace had originally been set up to be sold via Amazon for Kindle ereaders, and it would seem that some idiot at the publishers (rather than B & N) had simply done a search and replace for the word “Kindle” in the text to avoid any references to Amazon’s Kindle ereader.
Just shows what lazy work can produce, doesn’t it?
I have to confess to a sneaking sympathy with whichever lowly idiot it was who caused this silly situation to arise… to work your way through that enormous book looking for any reference to the Amazon Kindle ereader that might have been placed there for the Kindle version would be a week’s work, and so he took the easy (and foolish) way out, and automated it……..
All manner of complex conspiracy theories were posted on his blog by commentators, all more or less along the lines of “this is a sneaky form of advertising for Nook ereaders, but this is obviously not the case, as in order to bump into this set of typos, one has to already have a Nook ereader.
But a number of comments I have seen on this story point out one very obvious fact though, which is it is silly to pay good money for any classic ebook, as almost all such are available on Gutenberg for free, and generally proof read too.
Don’t waste your money.
It irritates me when I come across such out of copyright ebooks on the Kindle, Sony, Nook, Kobo and other online ebook stores for all manner of prices, knowing that they can all be obtained free in all the standard ebook formats from sites such as Gutenberg. So good people, do not waste your hard earned money in commercial online ebook sites if the classics are what you wish to read – which includes of course, the Bible, the Koran, and all manner of Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist holy writings – all of which can be downloaded at no cost at Gutenberg and the like.
Link to original post: http://villagecraftsmen.blogspot.com/2012/05/nookd.html
Link to the USA Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/
Share with us:
What is your take on this story….. is it funny or seriously annoying?
June 4th, 2012 at 6:14 pm
Great post. Selling ebooks that can be found free at gutenberg makes only sense if the text has been modified in any way. That is, if notes or an introduction has been added or the text has been adapted to modern form.
Amazon promised to take care of this and get rid of multiple versions of similar content ebooks, we’ll see.
June 4th, 2012 at 7:43 pm
Tony, you wrote: “. . . to work your way through that enormous book looking for any reference to the Amazon Kindle ereader that might have been placed there for the Kindle version would be a week’s work. . . .” I have to disagree — it would have taken seconds, not a week, just like it took seconds to make the error. If you can do an automated Find & Replace, you can do a manual Find & Replace. In addition, you would only need to search for Kindle, not for kindle, and you could limit the search to the whole word only so you wouldn’t get hits like kindled. There is no excuse whatsoever for having done a Find & Replace like the publisher did.
Alas, it demonstrates the effect that the decline of traditional publishing has had on publishing: people are simply pushing words into self-publishing without understanding what steps should be adhered to to ensure a quality end result.
June 4th, 2012 at 8:08 pm
@ Rich, True, I hadn’t really thought it through. At the very least they could have done a search for “Kindle” and every time it popped up, then decided if it was to stay or not… would take more than a few seconds, but as I can’t really imagine the word “Kindle” appears all that often in War and Peace, wouldn’t have taken that long.
Your further thoughts about the lowering of standards… well I agree totally and am saddened by it.