20 July 2011
There’s a recent opinion piece in the New York Times Online about how digital publishing has created a boom in typos and bad spelling making their way through to appear in the final versions of books and other publications. It’s interesting, but I don’t buy the arguments put forth by Virginia Heffernan, the article’s author. The cause isn’t digital technology, it’s corporate economics.
As Ms. Heffernan points out, there have always been bad spellers, and the ability to spell correctly does not correlate with excellence in writing. She rightly gives the example of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was a notoriously incompetent speller. There has always been pressure to publish quickly. What has changed? Ms. Heffernan says:
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.
To which I reply, post hoc ergo propter hoc. Digital technology did not fire the copy editors, management did. The cause is the surge in Wall Street mergers and acquisitions that began in the 1980s. Publishing was always a low-profit enterprise, with expected returns of 5–8%. But once assembled into huge media conglomerates, book divisions had to compete with more profitable divisions and owners demanded returns of 20–25%. To accomplish this, publishers churned out more product and cut overhead—all those copy editors and their princely salaries.
(The same economics are what is killing newspapers. Yes, the decline in ad revenue is unsustainable in the long term, but for the moment, most newspapers are still highly profitable. They’re cash machines. What is killing newspapers is the enormous debt they have accumulated in acquiring other newspapers and becoming media conglomerates.)
Ms. Heffernan also blames “writerly inattention.” Manuscripts are longer and more carelessly assembled on the word processor, says Ms. Heffernan. I find this hard to believe. The same economic incentives that kept published books to a certain length in the typewriter era still obtain, and successful online writers know that brevity is important to retaining a reader’s attention, perhaps more so than in print. And I can’t believe that manuscripts were better organized and structured in the days of the typewriter. Word processors allow a writer to edit and structure a text much more easily and consistently than is ever possible with a typewriter. Although it may be true that the apparent ease with which authorial editing can be done electronically encourages sloppy writers who would have been daunted by the prospects of doing it in the typewriter era. So editors may be seeing more terribly constructed manuscripts in their slush piles.
There is one area where digital technology does make a difference in spelling, but Ms. Heffernan doesn’t touch on it. That is poorly scanned e-books. Amazon and Apple’s iStore are filled with cheap editions of public domain books that have been hastily scanned and converted to text with optical character recognition software. While OCR software has gotten pretty good, it’s error rate is still considerable, and any OCR’d text needs a thorough proofreading before it is worthy of publication. But again, economics step in and the low prices these e-books command, typically around one dollar, don’t make it feasible to hire proofreaders. As a result, these texts are rife with errors, some to the point they are unreadable. Even here, it is economics and not technology that is creating the problem.
(Hat Tip: Barbara Need)
