Typos in books

Is it me, or are there more spelling errors and typos in books lately?

I'm reading Michael Lewis' "The Blind Side" (yes, four years behind the curve). I'm very excited to read this, as I was "Moneyball," but I'm halfway through the first page, and I find the word "runing" instead of "running."

How does this get through all the way to a paperback edition of a best-seller? Forget multiple editors -- a cursory spellcheck would catch it. I suppose it could have been added in a later edition, but I'm still surprised when I find simple spelling errors in otherwise well-edited books from major publishing houses.

 

I've noticed a handful of factual errors in books I've been reading recently, including some that should have been obvious to anyone with even a passing interest in the subject being written about. Drives me nuts.

 

No, I think I've seen more ... and I'm not really even trying to edit the publications.

I have a copy of John Feinstein's "A Good Walk Spoiled" which has "makable" in place of "makeable" in numerous places. One of his college basketball books has numerous name misspellings - and at least one of them is of a Duke player ... funny when one considers that the school is also Feinstein's alma mater.

While I like Feinstein, those errors are still glaring.

 

I had a textbook this semester that was one of the most poorly edited books I've ever read. It was more surprising to read a page without an error than with one. Of course, it was the first edition of the book, but I still paid $120 for it...used.

 

Probably written by an English professor ...

 

Feinstein is an editor's nightmare.

 

Why?
Too many fragments?
Too jumbled or too much material to pare down?
Too much to interpret?
Difficult on editors?

 

When Feinstein was a staff writer at the Wash. Post, his stories had plenty of factual errors. I noticed this when he wrote something upon which I was very familiar, and the Post copy desk obviously was not. Pretty shocking that he was that sloppy.

 

I think it goes back to that crap I learned in college that most people only read the first and last letters of a word and their brain fills in the word based on the context in which the sentence is written.
Thought it was a load of BS, but my brain has been doing it a lot lately and seeing the wrong words. My wife rags on me incessantly for it.

 

Beyond having to check his facts and spelling errors, he'd write these huge-ass paragraphs which could be broken down to 2, 3 or 4 grafs.

 

Simmons' Book of Basketball was huge, so there were bound to be some mistakes.
So he went ahead and corrected them. I thought this was pretty cool.

http://www.thebookofbasketball.com/

 

I forget which book it was in, but Bryant Gumble's name was spelled as Gumball. Multiple times, too.