Saturday, May 03, 2008

More problem's with apostrophe's






You'll need to click on the image above to enlarge it enough to read. It's taken from page 30 of the current issue of Card Player magazine.

The book featured is titled Confessions of a Poker Dealer: A Short History of Poker Played in Casino's Since the Late 1970's. I see from amazon.com that it was released in December, 2007, and is apparently from a vanity press. That would explain the lack of an editor to catch typographical errors in the title, on the cover! That's something I don't think I've seen before.

But then Card Player repeats the error in its accompanying text. Look on the second line, where it says "the way casino's robbed poker players." Strangely, though, casinos appears correctly in the first line. Furthermore, Card Player has correctly rendered the various decades, e.g., 1970s, rather than 1970's, as the book's title erroneously has it.

The paragraph of text, however, was not written by anybody at Card Player, as far as I can tell. The same text appears as the "product description" on amazon.com, suggesting that it was written by the book's author. Card Player did manage to clean up most of the typos that appear on amazon.com--but they let that one instance of casino's through, for some unknown reason.

Of course, they wouldn't have had to deal with that problem if they had written original text to describe the book, rather than taking the publisher's description and trying to pass it off as if it were their own. Bad as it is for a respectable periodical to make the plural of casino with an apostrophe, plagiarism is a greater offense.

At least the title is honest about one thing: "Short"--according to amazon.com, 48 pages short. For $15. I can't imagine that it would be worth it, especially since it's likely that the entire book is as badly written/edited as the front cover.

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