It occurs to me that Amazon’s missing a trick. If you’re reading a Kindle e-book, you can highlight text. If you like, your highlights can be shared with others, and can be synced to every Kindle or other device on which you read Kindle books.
So…suppose you’re reading an e-book, and you see a typographical error. You should be able to highlight it, and mark it as an error. Amazon should accumulate this, and when enough people have flagged the same error, Amazon should send a report to the publisher and arrange to get it fixed.
The View from the Foothills 
That is brilliant!
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Great idea. I’ve seen some really crappy formatting on e-books published by highly respected publishers.
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IIRC Project Gutenberg has something called DP (Distributed Proofreading) as part of their workflow. After OCR a set of volunteers reads the result and compares to the images. Each person only a few pages/day. Work spread across several hundred.
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And Gutenberg does a good job.
The fact is, even print books often have serious errors these days; editing and proof-reading aren’t what they used to be. With my scheme, those who care can do something about it, instead of just complaining, and if it’s done right they’ll see the fixes flow in over time.
The part I like most is that it’s precisely the books that like most, the ones they study or re-read, that will get most of the attention…and hence will be most likely to get fixed.
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