All the OCRs of Pern

I picked up a new printing of Anne McCaffrey's The Dragonriders of Pern t'other day. I'd recently re-read and vastly enjoyed the first two books in her Harper Hall trilogy--nearly perfect juvie fantasy--and wanted to continue reliving my personal Golden Age. ("The Golden Age of SF is twelve.")

And I have. There's an essay working in the back of my head about McCaffrey's Pern, Andre Norton's Witch World, Christopher Stasheff's Warlock series, and Sharon Shinn's Samaria series, but that's for later.

What struck me about this edition of tDoP is, frankly, the lack of care that went into it. It seems apparent that the original typeset manuscript (from the Science Fiction Book Club edition) was unavailable or unsuitable, so Del Rey scanned in and OCRed one of the SFBC volumes.

And published it.

Without copyediting.

There are hundreds of text mutations, almost all of which are the sorts of errors introduced by OCR. Weyr leader T'bor, for example, appears in one place as "T'don". Many of the spelling errors in the standard English words were caught, but none of the ones introduced into the jargon words. And, of course, a spellchecker won't catch dropped words or spliced phrases.

Now, blah state of the publishing blah blah fixed costs blah death of the midlist market blah. I understand that copy editors cost money. But do you really want to be known as a cheapass tightwad who produces a shoddy product? Feh.

Posted by Greg at August 26, 2003 10:13 AM