Sometimes the digital world just gives and gives to us fans. It turns out that due to an ebook formatting error, some versions of George R.R. Martin’s A Feast For Crows contain his name and the book’s title littered in strange places throughout the text. Thanks to Tumblr user gameoflulz, we have some choice pictures of such errors, which cast Martin as any number of items and people. We may never breathe again if we don’t stop laughing soon….
We just…
Can you imagine reading the entire book this way? This is like when your phone autocorrects your texts only 5,000 times better.
Oh, internet. Never lose this sparkling diamond. You will be forever entertained.
Stubby the Rocket is the Tor.com mascot. Stubby once took the crew to a baseball game in 2035, and the Cracker Jack boxes were full up of George R.R. Martin.
Ha! Probably an OCR problem. It’s not the funniest scanning error I’ve seen in ASoIaF ebooks – that has to be various characters worrying that dragons will ‘bum them’.
It is known George R.R. Martin.
Just more evidence on how major publishers treat digital books. They’re an afterthought, not really worthy of proofing or proper typesetting.
Oh, this is beautiful. Beautiful!
So why won’t publishers correct ebook mistakes? When I started reading ebooks, I sent out corrections for a handful of ebooks, and never heard anything back from anyone.
You know nothing, George R. R. Martin.
All George R.R. Martin’s are bastards in their father’s eyes.
Stick em with the George R.R. Martin – A Feast for Crows
Winter is George R. R. Martin – A Feast for Crows. :P This is fun!
A mind needs George R.R. Martin – A Feast for Crows as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.
There is only one god and his name is George R.R. Martin – A Feast for Crows. And there is only one thing we say to George R.R. Martin – A Feast for Crows: “Not today.”
And I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples and bastards and George R.R. Martin – A Feast for Crows.
This is why I do not believe it costs as much to produce an ebook as a print manuscript… Sure they have to pay the typesetters just as much for this as what the do for a physical book.
That sort of things happened to me frequently when I used Calibre to convert PDF books (usually manuscripts from the editor I worked with at the time) to .epub, for displaying on my ereader. The PDF files had the author name, book title and page number at the top of every page, as in print books, and Calibre’s converter treated that as part of the text.
I eventually figured out the trick of automagically weeding them out using Calibre’s awesome regexp wizard feature (basically, it’s your Word search-and-replace tool on steroids). Looks like someone did a conversion and forgot to check on the results before sending the thing out.
It is pretty hilarious, though. And don’t forget: A Lannister always pays his George R. R. Martin – A Feast For Crows.
This is admittedly hilarious.
However, it’s not a problem endemic to GRRM’s books in the ebook format. I have all the ebooks and my “copies” have no errors. Also based on the numbers of ebooks sold, and the lack of prior publicity, it seems like this is a very rare instance.
It’s unlikely this is an OCR or converter issue. Perhaps some weird file corruption has occured on the ereader or at the download site? Or it’s a funny hoax.
For the night is dark, and full of George R.R. Martin – A Feast for Crows.
It’s a copyright scheme.
Each e-book sold has a unique sabotage in the text at some place.
The theory is that if an e-book spreads they can check which e-book was the source and then punish that person. You know like Piratebay, 10 million trillion gazillion dollars and 200 years in jail. That sorta thing, and they think it’s worth it having books that are actually broken for it.
Ok…pretty sure I scared my neighbours with how hard I was laughing.
Maybe they should have bought the books instead of pirating them?
These are obvious errors caused by a converter or OCR picking up the header/footer material and inserting it into the text. The commercial versions of the ebooks do not have these problems.
I’m pretty sure the eBook copies that have these “errors” are pirated scans. My eBook copies purchased form Amazon do not have these.
I actually got tears in my eyes from laughing out loud, and my mom called out for me from the other room by the sound, afraid that I was crying :D
It happened when I formatted from RTF to epub using Calibre. It was initially irritating, but they landed so perfectly in some parts I had to wonder.
I’m pretty sure it just inserted the header for the original page along with the regular text.
Yes, there are more that I haven’t posted yet.
Desist from mocking the sacred ebooks, or I shall slay thee with my George R.R. Martin & and a Feast For Crows you shalt become.
i think it’s suspicious that “George R.R. Martin ” actually fits in those sentences perfectly…