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Recently I read a couple of books with some of the following mistakes:
Should I bother reporting this to the authors? I do not want to be unpolite but some errors are severe and make the reading hard to understand. Would it matter anyway? Some books are in 3rd/4th edition and still contain these kind of mistakes.
It's impossible to say how the author or the publisher will respond to the reported errors. There are publishers that maintain a list of errata online, including errata reported by readers. See for example the list of errata for Introduction to Machine Learning with Python, published by O'Reilly Media.
As an anecdote, I can tell you the story of a colleague's brother, who worked through a textbook, listing all the errors, including suggestions for improvement, and sent that list to the publisher. As a reward, the publisher later sent him the next edition of the book free of charge.
I don't know to what extent this also applies to publishers of literary works.
Most authors who I have contacted to report errors have been grateful that someone cared enough to read their book closely enough to note the errors, although some have declined to issue a correction.
One thing to note is that if this is an electronic book on Kindle, and you have any care for the author, do not report the book on Amazon. That triggers an automatic process which can lock a book away for sales for weeks, and according to some authors, leaves a black mark on their record which impacts their ability to sell other books, even if they immediately make and submit a correction.
