Content and Container

So this weeks question has probably been the most challenging for me. As someone who knows almost next to nothing about video games and computer programming, as well as never having read an eBook, I had some trouble when I sat down to start writing this. I started thinking about eBooks in general and formatting issues I remember hearing about over the years on the Internet. Being someone who spends more time than I would like to admit on reddit, imgur, and tumblr I have seen many a screen shots of hilarious and shameful formatting errors. 

A big one I remember seeing was George R.R. Martin’s “A Feast for Crows”. I re-looked this up again to find some shots to show you guys: 

 So basically you can see that because of an error some the versions contained his name and the books title littered throughout the text, and in most cases its pretty funny. At first I thought why would such a huge error be overlooked in the editing process? Are eBooks not as important as traditional books in some publisher’s eyes? Do they not spend enough time proofing or proper typesetting?

As it became clear that this was in fact not a formatting error (because not everyone’s copy included this mistake), another option of why it was like this was raised. Pirating! Turns out that errors like this can result from people not knowing how to properly format and filter out the page header. So I thought this was an interesting example of the content being affected by the container because nowadays more and more people are pirating books, music, and movies. And if the person making it available online illegally does not know how to properly format the material then the material will be altered.  Seeing as it is so easy to download just about anything for free now it is easy to make the assumption that we have all encountered a file we tried to download and had it be corrupted or not functional.

I mean you are getting these products for free, so if they are not perfect you can’t really complain, but still valid to look at the fact that a large number of people are probably watching, reading, listening to materials that have various formatting errors.