All of us who have come to love and depend upon ebooks know that they frequently are rife with errors of grammar, punctuation and spelling. This problem seems to be most common with books that are in the public domain, but the problem isn't limited exclusively to them. Fortunately, it does seem to me that, as ebooks claim a greater share of the market, the problem is diminishing.
I recently purchased an ebook from Amazon with, I thought, a reasonable expectation that it wouldn't have many of these egregious errors since it had a 2010 copyright. I was irritated to find the word "003s" on the very first page. I didn't even try to puzzle it out using the context; because it was on the first page, I went to a different edition of the same book on Amazon, looked at the first page and saw the real word.
Despite this inauspicious beginning, I haven't encountered any other errors in the book. But I have encountered the original error over and over again. "003" represents a string of letters, and throughout the book, whenever that string of letters is part of the text, they are replaced in this ebook by "003."
So far I have encountered: 003s, 003t, 003ted, 003ts, 003e, 003ing and 003ting. Your task is to determine what string of letters I have to substitute in my mind when I run into 003 in the book. Possibly there is more than one letter string which could be substituted. If so, you will get credit for solving the puzzle, even if it isn't what I'm looking for.
I have also found three hyphenated words that include 003, but the answer would become obvious if I were to give them to you here. Possibly you can make of that a clue.
1 comment:
OOOOOH, this is fun. My first attempt was "far" but that was too much fun.
Still working. Probably not going to get it, though. Good puzzle.
I am going to make the assumption that the first two letters are not the same although they are represented by the characters "00."
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