I doubt her copy had been copy edited (edited for grammar and such) and proofread yet (for clean pagination and such).
That reminds me of some stuff I noticed in my last reading of Blood Rites. I think it might be the worst (copy) edited book of the DF. I noticed so many mistakes (for a Penguin book, at least). The funniest one was "Harry said" instead of "I said."
Copy editing + pagination is the shortest step in the process. When I did it professionally, a Peace Talks-length book would be the work of about two weeks, if I really dragged my feet. That includes generating the clean EPUB/MOBI/AZW3 files for eBook sales, laying out the document for printing, adjusting the kerning if they went with justified text (I'm a ragged-right proponent, because kerning blows—but eBooks are justified by default, so you have to do it anyway), etc. I had to learn HTML to make sure the eBooks were formatted nicely. I've read some pirated copies of Jim's books (I had already purchased the eBook iterations, but needed EPUBs with no DRM so I could copy + paste from it for some presentations on modern novels; I'd never steal from Jim). All of them had some of the worst formatting errors I'd ever seen. They looked like they were copied and pasted from PDFs.
For those who don't know, PDFs are a fixed-layout file format. No matter what screen size you're using, page 53 will always be page 53; you have to zoom in/out and scroll around to view it if you're looking at one on a phone. EPUBs are dynamic; they scale down to whatever you're reading on (a few years ago, they tried to roll out a fixed-layout EPUB, but it never took off because it's a terrible concept). But anyway, word processors tend to interpret all of the formatting in a PDF precisely. So the end of a line in a PDF will get a hard line break when you copy and paste it into Microsoft Word. That means you have all of these weird paragraphs with random breaks spread across a whole document. It's a real pain to clean that kind of thing up (there is no quick fix; you have to go through it and delete the breaks, fix the spacing, etc.)
Anyway, about 90% of the pirated books I've looked at (again, I owned them all already, it was only done for presentation purposes, hand to God) have been formatting horror shows. One of the copies for one of the Codex Alera books lacked quotation marks throughout the whole text. Some of the books had the infamous "I don't know what this character is supposed to be" blank, empty squares all over the place (some of the conversion programs and OCRs have trouble interpreting various punctuation marks if the fonts aren't Times New Roman (and some even if it
is TNR)).
But anywho, when you have a Word document to start with, on the other hand, formatting everything perfectly is easy as heck. The only sticky parts are when you have images within the main document (children's books and cookbooks are annoying that way). But pure text? Pshaw. It can be done nicely in an afternoon. Unless, you know, Jim does things like manually press "Enter" twenty times to start a new page (page breaks, people. Ctrl+Enter.) Widows and orphans, adjusting the hyphenation, kerning, all that stuff can be done pretty fast.
I seem to have wandered a bit. The point is that Penguin should be done with that whole process by now, especially because (I assume and
hope) they have multiple specialists working on each part. Still has to be done in stages (widows and orphans can fix themselves, justification changes when characters are added or deleted, etc.) but specialists can usually do their one task efficiently. It's been a month since Priscillie announced it, and I'd assume Penguin had it before her. Should be set by now, or close enough that it's not worth considering.
And as for copy editing mistakes: there is no such thing as a perfect document, not now, not ever. Any editor can look at any document and find things to change or mistakes to fix. The trick is to catch the ones that
anyone would notice. Questionable comma placement is one thing, but mess up the tensing and everyone will say, "Gotcha!"
I caught the Blood Rites "Harry" mistake too, and rolled my eyes when I saw it. Whoever edits Terry Brooks's novels should be fired, for that matter, because all of his novels have extremely noticeable mistakes. I'm currently reading The Witcher novels (finally, I've been putting it off for years). Whoever is responsible for editing the translated text needs to learn how semicolons should be used, because they're all over the place. Not one has been correct, but they've all been wrong for different reasons.
