Typos in ebooks really annoy readers

Typos happen in any book, but I was very pleased to get an email from Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) today, pointing out that they had found three typos in one of my books.

Hello,

We’re writing to let you know that readers have reported a problem in your book.

There are some words in your book that our spell check dictionary could not identify. If any of the words are not spelled the way you intended, please update your content and resubmit it to us.

You can also email us at kdp-support@amazon.com to let us know that the words are spelled correctly. Here are the words and their locations:

Kindle Location: 6866 ; Description: “there where times when” should be “there were times when”
Kindle Location: 7298 ; Description: “heart is was called” should be “heart it was called”
Kindle Location: 6967 ; Description: “thorn is the side” should be “thorn in the side”

After you’ve made the correction, please upload your revised content through the ‘Book Content’ section in your KDP Bookshelf. If you have further questions, please reply directly to this email and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

For further information regarding specific book errors (including why some errors are more critical than others), please see the Guide to Kindle Content Quality Errors at https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=200952510.

Thanks for using Amazon KDP!

Any means to rid typos in ebooks is a good thing

I was a bit surprised, though, as this particular book has been published for quite some time, but I was somewhat relieved as well, because this book is nearly 170,00 words long, so three typos are not so bad in a book that long, even though I had worked extremely hard to make sure it was perfect and free of typos.

But for KDP to let me know means that they are getting very serious about improving the quality of Kindle ebooks in general.

It was interesting to note in their email though that they state that readers had reported the errors.

I’m not sure how this works, as killing typos in any way is good news, but why rely on readers?

For some time, KDP has had a spell checker that analyses any new manuscript that is uploaded to KDP and notifies of any possible spelling errors or typos before publication.

But to add contextual correction would be a big plus, and it is something that other online publishers should consider adding.

Is there a better way to catch typos in ebooks?

The only point that I wonder about is why Amazon rely on reader notifications to find these contextual typos on KDP?

An online proofreading program such as Grammarly does a very good job of finding contextual typos, so why doesn’t KDP use something similar to scan newly uploaded manuscripts and find these typos before they get published?

Anything that helps eradicate typos in self-published books is good.

But I truly hope that KDP and other online publishers can find a way to do this before publication, and not rely on readers to notify them of typos they find.