Original story If it were me I would DEFINATLY find a different publisher for next year. And "free stickers"? WTF kind of BS is that?
It's true that pretty much every yearbook has errors. At least the publisher is accepting the responsibility and offering a solution to problem. Totally reprinting may be very cost prohibitive. But really, I'd rather stick with "Max Supernova." It has a nice ring to it. -monkey
In ours, a friend of mine had his name printed incorrectly two lines from where it was printed correctly! Now that is bad proofreading...
That's kind of the point. You can take all the care in the world, but mistakes inevitably appear. This is especially true for yearbooks, which often are created and edited by high school journalism students. The printers might look for obvious spelling errors, but they can't take it upon themselves to check every name, nor can they assume how names are spelled. In may cases it's not really their responsibility. Consider the fact that a simple internet post should, in theory, be free of spelling errors (especially true for anyone using Firefox with its built-in spell check). Still, it happens. Errors are a fact of life. Printers and publishers can do whatever they can to try to catch these errors the first time around, but when you bang out over 1000 books with full-color pages, the costs tend to add up. Plus, it's just a high school yearbook. These kinds of things are really important for about 1, maybe 2, years after graduation. Then, real life begins and people move on. In my senior year, one of the photo captions listed me as a sophomore. I remember being upset for about 5 minutes, then I got over it. -monkey
It's a pretty standard fix, I'm pretty sure they did that in at least one of my yearbooks. Seriously, it's a yearbook. Maybe in 30 years when I need to remember my youthful beginnings I'll look at it again and laugh at that one spelling error. Big deal. Like supermonkey said, they're often edited by the students - I know mine were - and I think we all know what kind of attention span most HS students have.
Max Supernova... reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Homer changes his name to Max Power. "No one snuggles with Max Supernova, you strap yourself in a feel the Gs"
What's a year book anyway? I've never had one and don't really feel like I've been missing something huge.
A yearbook is just a printed book containing photographs and memories of everyone in your year at School / College / University. Usually it just contains Photographs of each person, some photographs submitted from big / memorable events, and a page each student gets to write answering questions like "What was your most memorable experience?" "Where are you going to be in 5 years time?" etc. Sometimes they have contact details in the back, but that's less common. Usually they're just fun to look back over in a year, ten years, even fifty years time and see the faces you grew up with, or even to compare between what people had written about what they want to be with what they are now. Not to mention if you ever get brutally murdered, your yearbook photo usually ends up plastered all over the news...
FTFA: "Ed Patrick of Taylor Publishing, which printed the book, said his company is responsible for the errors". The school paid for a product, which they did not receive. It's that simple. If the school had made the error then they wouldn't have a leg to stand on, but they didn't. I completely agree with your last point, I just think that the school should receive what they paid for. A discount may also be acceptable. This isn't just a typo, they ran some software which went through and significantly changed the content they were paid to print. It's hardly the end of the world, but the principle is what irritates me.
Stickers. heh. If i were them, I would ship out a bunch of stickers like the ones you get at doctors offices. "Yay for you!
Why did the publishers even bother making any changes? Surely its not their job to fix mistakes in things they've been sent to print. If they do, they just open themselves up to this kinda thing where they ARE liable for the error. :S
I work at a design agency. If one of our printers ballsed up a job that badly then we would demand a reprint, even if they do end up losing money on the job. Likewise if we make a simlarly serious mistake and it's not good enough for the client, we cover the costs of a reprint. Why didn't the printers send the school a proof? It's pretty common practise.
This is just conjecture, so keep that in mind. Schools generally operate with very little money. Most of a school's budget is eaten by bigger and better things, like uniforms for the athletic team and a nice oak desk for the principal's office. I'd bet my left foot that the yearbook group had very little to spend, and shopped for a printer accordingly. You get what you pay for, even in the glossy world of graphic design. Still, I'm not sure why this is really news. Just about every yearbook is plagued with spelling errors and botched names; it's almost a part of what makes it a high school yearbook. -monkey
