Typos - Toll of Honor

I just finished reading the EPUB version of Toll of Honor and enjoyed how it filled in somethings mentioned briefly in other Honorverse books.

It has been my experience that typos are something that are nearly impossible to totally eliminate. But we can try and hope that the electronic versions are updated at least.

One of the first things I noticed in the EPUB version of Toll of Honor was the first word of the first sentence of a chapter didn't have the first letter capitalized. I thought it might be a typo but looked at some first pages of other chapters and saw they all had the same thing, so it must have been a stylistic choice. I know that doing the extra large first letter is problematic in ebooks and doing the first word enlarged is just as much an issue. Personally I prefer the first word of the first paragraph of the chapter to be just like the first word of any other paragraph. But that's me. YMMV

But here are what I believe are some legitimate typos:

Chapter 3: Two or three tunes, judging by the damages."
I suspect that should times instead of tunes.

Chapter 4: couldn't even begin working on that problem until Doc Whalen signed off on it structural integrity.
Shouldn't it be possessive?

Chapter 6: "Truth to tell, I wasn't all sure for a while that they were going to repair Cassie
Wouldn't: wasn't all that sure or wasn't at all sure be better?

Chapter 27, third paragraph: monumentally high in the space station's food chain personally coming?
I think comming would be more appropriate since the base word involved is communicating. Coming is frequently used in the normal sense of so-and-so is coming to visit. Calling is what we would use in "civilian usage" I guess, but English is confusing enough without us needing to create new words that sound identical to already existing words.

Chapter 35: It was specifically designed so that one outside could hear anything said inside it
I'm pretty sure that should be either: so that no one outside could hear
or: so that one outside it couldn't hear
The way it is would be pretty much a spy's dream situation!

Chapter 37: they'd destroyed twenty Peep ships-of-the-wall—seventeen super dreadnoughts and thirteen dreadnoughts
Now I tend to screw up math way too often for comfort, but the last time I checked 17 + 13 = 30. And my calculator even agrees with me!


Well, that's all I noticed in my first reading of Toll of Honor. One of the (dis)advantages of reading on an iPad, is that one can take notes about typos and questions to ask the author possibly. It also is so handy to be able to check the meaning of a word that I think I know and it seems to agree with the context, but... The problem is that I have found myself tapping on a word in a printed book trying to get it to bring the definition - and it doesn't work at all!

Great work David! Please keep the books coming! I'm eager to read the followup books to Sword of the South, Through Fiery Trials, and I'm waiting for a followup to We Few to find out what happens with Roger McClintock running things! Hopefully you're memory is doing better than mine is, but you are 24 days younger than me so there's hope!

One thing I noticed about the hardcover is that the first sentence in most (all?) of the chapters started with a few words in all caps (these were the same words that were all lower case in the electronic version).

LewK wrote:One of the first things I noticed in the EPUB version of Toll of Honor was the first word of the first sentence of a chapter didn't have the first letter capitalized.

Yeah, that looks like some formatting didn't apply. I suspect that they meant to use uppercase for the entire first sentence, possibly with some other nicer framing of the first letter.

Well, that's all I noticed in my first reading of Toll of Honor.

Alistair's name is also misspelt twice: once as Alastair and once as Alister. In both cases they happen in someone's sentence, so that could be excused by their just pronouncing it wrong (like remembering the difference between Stephen, Steven, and Steve).

I found that, for a first edition, the typo rate is remarkably low. Like you said, they are to be expected and we can hope that this helps them improve for a second edition. I hadn't even noticed most of those you posted; I think only the "coming" (instead of "comming", which is not in today's dictionaries).

One of the (dis)advantages of reading on an iPad, is that one can take notes about typos and questions to ask the author possibly.

I read on the Kindle and there's a way to report typos. I don't know if that ever gets back to the editors and authors. I know for certain that one other author I know that makes lots of mistakes ("loose", "compliment", some other homophonyms) has not improved much, so I don't think they do.

With the Kindle reader, you can mark passages and make notes. I have some I need to go through and post here about, but haven't yet.