The decent thing to do is to contact the publisher via customer service. And we do process corrections for print reprints and, more quickly, the ebook. Leave the author out of it. https://twitter.com/brianjayjones/status/1265001514642239488

And please skip the “whither publishing” laments. No one needs that.

I field a lot of customer service queries, and many readers are kind and helpful (and find really interesting glitches), and often I’ll say thank you myself.

Like the time a reader queried an odd continuity lapse and after a little sleuthing I found out that eight paragraphs had gone missing from a book decades before and no one had ever noticed.

I inferred that it was a xeroxing mishap when a hardcover was being reset into a mass market and a spread went missing—unfortunately one that neatly started with a paragraph beginning and ended with a paragraph end.

Yes, we fixed it.

My personal best as a freelance proofreader was figuring out that a line of dialogue had been dropped from the translation of a classic (it was being reset for a new edition) fifty years earlier. The translator was still alive and, I was told, delighted to restore the line.

[There were a half dozen or so consecutive lines of unattributed dialogue, and I kept going he said she said he said etc. and couldn’t get it to work.]