Over the past couple of days, I have found egregious typos in a couple of very high-profile places on the web. One was in an article by the head of a well-thought-of Social Media site/newsletter where "of" was replacing "on" in a phrase, that was correctly rendered in the next line. Being a small typo, if it was standing on its own, one might understand how it could have slipped under the radar of a quick editorial once-over ... but having it in clear juxtaposition with the other made it (for me, at least) very hard to miss.
Then, this morning, I downloaded an "e-book" {When does a "whitepaper" grow into an "e-book"? This was a mere 27 pages, with 5 of those going to cover, copyright, promo, etc. bits ... a print 28-page book would be seen more as a pamphlet than a "book". Heck, my fairly slim poetry "chapbooks" back in the day ran 54 pages, counting the covers!} which had two glaring typos on its introductory page. From the nature of these typos, I'm guessing the author used a voice-to-text system, as the errors were of the sort that would be highly unlikely to have been made via typing, but could have easily been "mis-heard" by the program.
Needless to say, all of these errors were the form of actual words, so would not have had the ubiquitous squiggly red underline pointing them out. I have to assume that anything so highlighted in the pre-publication text would have been addressed ... but this also suggests that NOBODY bothered to actually read the piece once it existed in a file. In both of these cases, the errors stood out like the proverbial sore thumb ... and one would think that any reasonably literate person reading through the copy would have caught these easily.
I'm not saying "oh, these folks need to hire Professional Editors!", but giving beer money to a still-in-college English major to take a read-through would certainly have prevented these (what would be to me embarrassing) typos going live.
Obviously, I could be considered a cranky old former publisher, desperately clinging to the standards of a previous age, but it boggles my mind that these sorts of errors are going out in these sorts of high-profile publications.
Grumble, grumble, grumble ...