Amazon should use the Kindle to crowd source proof reading

The title says it all, but let me expand. The problem with crowd sourcing stuff is generally finding enough interested people and giving them an easy way to contribute to the larger problem. It’s unfortunate that unless the way to contribute is really easy people tend not to be that interested after all.

The Kindle is, at least to me, a bloody excellent device for reading books. However, I get really annoyed when the books I’ve just bought have some really glaring typos in them. I assume these mistakes stem from some shitty OCR the publishers paid someone (in the cheapest outsourcing market they could find) to do for them because they couldn’t possibly be expected to generate e-books in any vaguely modern way, like using computers and such.

An example of this the the Kindle version of Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis. Chapter 24 starts with the line:

“Aob picked us up outside our hotel, wearing his Same Old Bob face, not a hint of his earlier breakdown.”

What really irks me is that the a of “Aob” is a drop cap. Yes, that’s correct. However the hell Harper Collins transcribed this they managed to keep the correct capitalisation of his Same Old Bob face, and entirely fuck up the incredibly obvious drop cap at the beginning of the line. I assume, after having read a few, that publishers are happy to take my $9.99 for Kindle books, but not to pay someone to read them even one fucking time.

Anyway to get back to the point. I’d love to be able to annotate these fuck-ups with the handy keyboard on the Kindle. Since most of them are nothing more than simple typographical or scanning errors (A instead of B) it would be easy to show the most common ones to the publishers in a way that they could keep the Kindle books up-to-date with the latest fixes. I’d love to see Amazon, or Barnes and Noble with the Nook, push the technology a bit further and actually allow me to improve the books I read for the next guy, or the next time.