Happy New Year! All my books coming out in 2007 have been turned in to their respective editors, so I've been doing a lot of reading lately. All sorts of books - teen, adult, non-fiction - and I'm amazed at the typos I'm finding, although I shouldn't be. When a manuscript gets typeset, the author gets another look at it to make sure the sentences and scenes make sense, and that there aren't any typos. The publisher has someone reviewing the page proofs as well. So you'd think that, after so many eyes on it, there wouldn't be a single typo. But the thing is, I've proof-read my own books and there have still been typos in the finished book (which, unfortunately, I've had other people point out to me). I guess what I should really be amazed at is that there aren't more mistakes in books. With somewhere between 70,000 and 90,000 words in a book, a few mistakes here and there are probably unavoidable because it's all still a human process, and we're not exactly perfect ourselves.

The thing that amazes me, is how these typos stick out so blatently when reading someone else's book but your eye doesn't catch it when it's your own. I was reading a best-selling hardcover fiction book and there was a typo on page 17 - only 17 pages into the story! How can you miss that? Yesterday I was reading a non-fiction book published by the Harvard Business School press, and there it was, another typo. In a teen book I just finished, there was a typo in the first chapter. Mostly it's the reptition of words or words in the wrong order in a sentence. So, see, typos don't discriminate by publisher or genre or hardcover/paperback.

Isn't it nice to know that these mistakes aren't the result of some computer program failing to do it's job, but rather the fact that people are still responsible for writing and proofing books? At least that's what I tell myself. It beats the alternative - that we are too dumb to notice our own mistakes.