I picked up a used copy of Quaternions and Rotation Sequences by Jack B. Kuipers for a project I’m starting to work on. The feedback I’ve seen on the book says it has good content but also has lots of typos. My copy has a fair number of corrections that someone penciled in. Someone on Amazon alluded to an errata page for the book but I’ve been unable to find it.
This made me wonder more generally: Is there a project to create errata pages? I’m thinking especially of mathematical reference books. I’m not concerned with spelling errors and such, but rather errors in equations that could lead to hours of debugging.
I would be willing to curate and host errata pages for a few books I care about, but it would be better if this were its own site, maybe a Wiki.
I don’t want to duplicate someone else’s effort. So if there’s already a site for community-generated errata pages, I could add a little content there. But if there isn’t such a project out there already, maybe someone would like to start one.
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[1] Update: Jan Van lent found the errata page. See the first comment. Apparently the changes that were penciled into my book were copied from the author’s errata list. Also, these changes were applied to the paperback edition of the book.
There is a snapshot of the homepage on archive.org. It includes an errata file.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070206222955/http://www.calvin.edu/%7Ekprs/book/Errata.4.pdf
I am not aware of an errata pages project, but there are some web annotation projects that could maybe be used for this (e.g, Hypothes.is). I don’t know if any of them has really taken off though.
I appreciate the link provided by Jan in the comments. I also found there to be a lot of errors in the book, some of which appeared to be… more mathematical, so to speak, than mere typos. For example, the linked errata does not include the derivative of the quaternion on p. 264, that is missing a factor of 1/2 in the result, and it isn’t clear to me how to “fix” the derivation that is given.