"...the quality of editing and copyediting today (which we both find in a somewhat sorry state)." Too true (see below, from your post): "a more than one" "ddid not" "Enligihtenment" "com-poser" "se ethe a kid n" "preparing Jewish boys and girls for their bar and bas mitzvahs" (should be: "bar and bat mitzvahs") "perpetuity.)." "spar-kling prose" I'm happy you admitted to not being perfect. (I am FAR from perfect myself.) But I am also another ruthless editor.

I'd like to say something on behalf of the lowly copyeditors and proofreaders (speaking of which, I quit counting the typos in your post, but I digress). The fault lies, dear brutess, not in the Morlocks who do the work but in the Eloi who cavort in the profits--the MBAs who took over the majors lo these many years ago. They won't budget the time and money needed to turn out a quality product. They'd rather slap a pretty cover on the book and get it out the door to keep the stockholders happy. I recently posted about this on my own blog: ampersandvirgule.blogspot.com/2008/02/books-have-gone-from-bad-to-wurst.html

Now that copyeditors are freelance and not in-house, jobs often go to the lowest bidders (=least experienced). Good copyeditors are often booked well in advance; poor ones will work for close to free. Guess who gets the job?

Bound galleys that go out for review generally note "Uncorrected Proof" somewhere on the cover. That's because they haven't been corrected yet. The galley is being corrected at the same time that it goes out to reviewers.

Perhaps an important question is how hard the galleys are being pushed out the door. To write my page in a national magazine, I need to see the books at least seven weeks before their on-sale date. So maybe my publication is among the guilty: we make it necessary for publishers to get books into our hands faster than they really are ready to go out.

We have taken to completing a substantive edit of our books before we print galleys. Sure, there will still be typos at this stage; that's why we have copyeditors. But I'm not interested in seeing these kinds of factual errors mar the reviews of our novels.

Perhaps the fault lies not with the copyeditors and the proofreaders but with poor writers and publishers who offshore. If the book is as bad as you claim at review, imagine how badly written it was before it was edited and praise the editor for significantly improving the book before you see it. Sadly, however, in your case it is the poorly written review demanding better written books to review -- not a lot of credibility there!

Before one can assign blame, one must be familiar with the roles and tesponsibilities of the players and the book production process. And even then, one would need every version of the book available in order to track an error to see if it is original to the author or was introduced by a production editor, copyeditor, proofreader, compositor, etc.

Would that the name(s) of the editor(s) appeared on the galleys. Then a quiet e-mail could address a given situation, and public flogging wouldn't be necessary.

I feel part of the blame lies in the proliferation of copyeditors and proofreaders doing their work onscreen rather than on paper. Studies have shown that those who edit a digital file miss more errors than those who edit a printout. However, the efficient and eco-friendly "paperless office" is worth the occasional typo. I think as time goes on and people get more used to it, the quality of onscreen editing will improve and that will translate into fewer errors on galleys and in the final product--whether it be printed or digital.

I'm an editor and expert proofreader who's been downsized, twice. (Quantity over quality strikes again.) Hire me and I'll proof those galleys to a fare-thee-well!

When I buy books and find more than two minor errors in them, I make note of it and complain to the publisher. I have also encouraged others to do so, or return books to the store. After all, you wouldn't keep a tee shirt if you found a tear or a stain in it, would you? Maybe if we return and complain, publishers will start taking more care again.

Part of the problem is that most of the books in the marketplace today are self-published, and self-published authors, in an effort to save money, self-edit their own books. Self-editing saves on the initial publishing costs, but the errors in a book lead to bad word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth, more than anything else is what sells books. Tyler R. Tichelaar, Professional Editor, Superior Book Promotions

an interesting tidbit from the Nat Sobel interview in Poets and Writers -- "I think what is evolving today for agents is that they need to be the first line editors for their authors. Judith and I really love the editing process. We have spent years editing nearly every novel we've ever agented. We did that long before we began to discover how little editing was going on in the publishing houses. But today agents need to be far more proactive in almost every other area of the publishing process. We have to be the marketing directors for many of our books. We have to involve ourselves in looking at the jacket design, the jacket copy, the catalogue copy. We have to be very proactive in how we help direct the writer to help sell his or her book. Those are things you never thought about in agenting when I first came into it. You made the deal, you negotiated the contract, and that was it—the publisher took over."

I'm the editor of a university book review publication. I just handed in all of my content for our fall edition, which is coming out in August. I reviewed several books myself, and all were ARCs (advanced reading copies). It's clearly printed on the cover that these are uncorrected proofs and that there may be significant changes between the ARC and the published book. They sometimes ask reviewers not to quote from the ARC for that reason too. Like all of you, I've often come across mistakes in the galleys (some typos and some more significant problems). I never considered mentioning these in the reviews though, so this posting surprised me. The writer might have submitted an error-riddled manuscript or the editor might not have done a stellar job, but unless the problems appear in the final published version, isn't it unfair to mention this in the review? (Seriously, I'm wondering.) Several times in the last month, I've chuckled to read a well-known writer misuse a word, call a character Bob in chapter 2 and Bill in chapater 3, or seem not to understand how to use an apostrophe. If I saw this in a finished book, I'd absolutely point it out in a review, but since I'm looking at a draft that the public will never see, what would be gained by mentioning it?