Nah, typos in novels are almost always just typos, go ahead and let the publisher know. But do tell the publisher, don't tell the author, since that will just give them a panic attack to know an error got into the final book, and then they will just forward to the publisher anyway. Save a step.
Always wondered about typos in published novels and whether they should be reported. I’ve heard that they’re a shibboleth by publishers to prove copyright/guard against illegal copying.
My mother once got a link to the first chapter of a J. Evanovich galley where all the Ts were replaced with Fs.
My favourite example of a recurring typo was in an ARC of a fantasy novel whose antagonist was Arse, Greek god of war. I hope my email to the publisher was in time.
The best typos come from poorly executed find and replace.
In 1994, TSR published a Dungeons and Dragons sourcebook called the Encyclopedia Magica. They were in the process of changing magic users from being called mages to being called wizards. So they did a find and replace on *mage* and
Ah, a classic! Up there with ... Jorune, I think, which used S&R to go from metric to US traditional units, resulting in temperature being measured by thermoyards.
There was a comp.risks post about a newspaper editor showing off the power of his new computer-based system by using S&R to turn every m into an e, then using S&R to turn every e into an m. This did not produce the results he wanted.
During the era of yahoo groups, at one point they were doing global S&R on email to prevent scripting. The worst one was "eval" changing to "review", resulting in "reviewuation", "medireview", "retireview", and "chreview" (French).
It is very specifically a Rivers of London book, iirc the first one, and that one jumped out at me as well when I was rereading it last week.
(Reading the Kindle Reader version in the US.)
"Okay so Da Coach is scryin' wit an ol' Meister Brau bottle on Monday night. Ya figger he'll be able to see da game okay?"
"Tony, Da Coach is gonna be out dere countin' de laces on de ball."
Shitty find-replace was a key point in the Kitzmiller v Dover case that ruled Intelligent Design was just reheated creationism. “Cdesign Proponentists” in an early draft of the textbook they wanted to put into schools
Burma Jones, a main character in John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces, will be surprised to hear he needs to go by Myanmar Jones now.
In the early-mid 70s, my sister found a romance novel in which all the -ee- combinations had been changed to -eee-. Seemed a bit early for computers, but there we were.
