I don’t know if whoever flagged the typos in my eBook thought they were helping
twitter.com
twitter.com
It’s sad it can be used to grief, but as a user it’s the only method I have of pointing out the issues and asking for them to be addressed.
So they’d have to back to charging some amount of money, which leads us back to square one.
Big guy, little guy doesn’t matter in this case. An editor costs money and either Big Name Publisher can eat the cost or No Name Author, but it doesn’t benefit Amazon much to eat it.
Ironic typo?
Wait... What am I supposed to be parsing for again?
That the automated system as described can be abused is a real problem, and that needs to be addressed. But that is a separate issue from the generally bad state of what passes for final edits in many books nowadays. That the author in question can't be bothered to keep a current copy of their manuscript leaves me lukewarm on the issue.
Why should the author, rather than the publisher, be expected to produce a public-upload-ready file on demand? (If the deadlines other authors are reporting in the thread are accurate, I wouldn't even reasonably expect a full-time major publisher to hit them - and during the last week of the year?!)
(Well, technically Amazon is the publisher, but in Amazon's lexicon it's self-published.)
Example: https://www.smashwords.com/list
"Self-publishing" is really orthogonal to both of those, though today most people would probably describe any vanity press as effectively self-published.
In this case, (further down the thread) it was a dialect thing, so the whole problem was a false positive from an over zealous automated system on Christmas Eve, in prime panic ebook gifting time.
The majority of authors today don't know that software named pandoc exists, let alone what it does, let alone what it might do for them.
Either way, I bet many programmers would run into trouble if asked to drop everything and immediately spin back up a production-ready environment for a project they haven't touched in a year.
That is not uncommon, but neither is it the quantitative norm. A lot of authors are particular about the typesetting of their documents, and it does require a rendering environment.
It isn't unusual for a half-LaTeX half-something-else monstrosity to be rendered in a semi-custom environment. Especially if you're dealing with anything academic.
In those kinds of environments you may have a ton of assets, like graphs, that may either be large file-sizes, and/or re-generated during the rendering process from various large datasets. Those assets are not small, and may prevent you holding much more than a couple books on your $4 thumb drive.
I would argue that the whole point of having a publisher is to avoid having to do this kind of thing yourself, but I know many authors forego publishers because publishers don't want to publish their stuff or they don't agree with the publisher's cut. Both reasonable objections.
It's sort of like if you own a restaurant. If someone dies in your family, and at the same time a health inspection gets failed, you have one of two options: Drop everything and coordinate passing the inspection; or deal with your family stuff first and lose income when your product is not selling in the mean time. The more employees and structure you have, the easiest it is to get away for a few days. The more it's a sole proprietorship, the more your fate is in your hands.
(FWIW I am from Newfoundland -- although I'm not an author -- and while the isolation of rural areas is not exaggerated in the comment, it's also not a surprise to people traveling there. When I travel home, which in the last few years has just been for funerals, I have a plan in place)
It’s not as though this is a result of self-publishing.
But yes, writing for adults as T. Kingfisher she's mostly self-published, and that was the case with the book in question, I believe.
It is abuseable as all hell as demonstrated in the replies to the tweet. Even when not being used to make people's life miserable it is a failure of a system.
There should be a button available to authors and publishers that says "i dispute these flags" and when the button is pushed, the flags are put into a temporary status and the reviewer's/submitter's real name and address is provided to the author so the author can take them to court for damages. If the flagged items are just low quality then the author would lose in court and the submitted flagged items could then be assessed against the work. If the flagged items are not legitimate, then the person who submitted the bad reports can write a nice check to the author and amazon can then drop the bad reports from their system. The idea that everything can, or should, be handled within a platform (facebook, twitter, amazon, apple, google, etc.) is idiotic. There is a legal system for a reason and it's so that we can get a consistent and fair adjudication of our disputes.
Yeah, no chance of abuse there.
The author having to file a lawsuit against you is a much higher hurdle to get over than an anti-fan falsely flagging the authors work and costing them money. The common idea that people should be able to do anything they want without consequences and with a huge corporation -- who doesn't know them from Bob -- having to provide them with cover is childish.
Edit: typos
For technical education material (both mechanical engineering and optics recently for me), I definitely don't buy books where the comments indicate a lot of typos.
It's a real PITA to be working through practise exercises, and come up with a different result than the expected answer. Then not know if it's me, or the book author who got it wrong. :(
For fiction books though, an occasional typo is not a stress.
> "It’s super not helpful, particularly when the issue is vernacular English."
> THAT WASN'T EVEN A TYPO, PERSON, YOU GOT CONFUSED ABOUT THE SPEAKER
It would have been nice if the tweet poster would have made this abundantly clear, but alas. But a "typo" to me implies a mistake, and it's not clear to me if the flagger is flagging mistakes, or something that was intentional for the purposes of storytelling.
he can at any time publish a revision and be done with it
How can you revise things that aren’t mistakes?
are we better for it? probably not, but then again he's not forced to publish it into the low cost mass market, and knowing what the audience wants is basically his job description so...
Is using slang pretentious now?
A typo is not that. A typo is when one mistakenly spells something incorrectly, or incorrectly adds or removes a word to make sentence ungrammatical.
If it was intentional, then it’s author fiat. You don’t have to like it, but that’s no excuse for removing a book from a store.
To note, if Amazon themselves say they have an issue with his language, that’s their prerogative, but right now it just looks like abuse of their reporting system.
anyway, that's the difference between authorship and artistry, the fact that he caved show which side he's on. Amazon only obligation is with their customers and he's free to pursue less mainstream options if he wants uncompromised freedom
> so somehow he managed to get off his horse
Also you:
> that's the difference between authorship and artistry, the fact that he caved show which side he's on
You're entirely comfortable with only being able to publish the lowest common denominator of things which will be comprehensible to everyone, at the risk of being automatically pulled from publication if an author steps too far from a style that's perfectly clear to the reader?
Readers are giving feedback through an app that makes it easy for them to do so. Maybe the feedback is unhelpful, but I don't see anything here indicating that the readers are acting in bad faith.
These authors should start from a position of gratefulness that their work is being published and read. From there it would be much easier to interpret this in a constructive way.
> Hey, I don’t know if whoever flagged the typos in my ebook thought they were helping, but please don’t do that. That just means there’s a quality warning on Amazon’s sale’s page. It’s super not helpful, particularly when the issue is vernacular English.
> You have made my life way more difficult on Christmas Eve by setting this flag. I’m sure that wasn’t your intent, but...yeah, not great.
> Again, my dear proofreader friends, please don’t blame yourselves. Amazon doesn’t exactly explain that your desire to be helpful is telling a computer that Book Is Bad, Pull Bad Book.
I know you're trying to help, but don't do that. You're not being helpful because you don't know well enough. You didn't know better but you've ruined Christmas for me. That said, it's not you, it's Amazon.
There are also these:
> THAT WASN'T EVEN A TYPO, PERSON, YOU GOT CONFUSED ABOUT THE SPEAKER
> I will, sadly and angstfully, cop to typos. I make them. I’ve made peace. But now I’m supposed to fix failures of this person’s reading comprehension and understanding of vernacular so that Amazon will take down the tag saying my book is low quality. During a sale.
That isn’t what the author said, but that is an accurate assessment of the situation.
YOU made life difficult on Christmas Eve.
Don't blame YOURSELF
...wasn't YOUR intent.
So, unless I fall into the fantasy that the author is addressing an internal Amazon employee, it sounds as if those statements are being made towards the 'you' who reported the author.
It's all being snarky towards Amazon's broken system, no doubt, but the author doesn't seem to mind sharing the blame with the perpetrator of the report itself..
Certainly, the word "you" is used to address, but you would be mistaken in thinking that the word "you" alone implies blame. The rest of the quoted sentences clearly express the author deflecting the blame away from the person who made the reports on the book.
Here we have a system designed to facilitate near real-time feedback trying to push fixes upstream into a system built on hard-copy which is very non-trivial to merge patches into. Ultimately it punishes the author out-of-band of the publisher which is also broken. Sure, you can flail your finger at the stupid publishers for still printing in hard copy, but that doesn't solve the problem.
Huge budgets. Insane costs to the user. “Low quality” would be the nicest thing said about them.
If I’m a paying user, how does this stuff make it through quality control? It’s because, there is no quality control.
Sure it's not the best system, but the tone is condescending and unconstructive. I get that it's cool on Twitter to hyperbolize and vent, but in any other forum this would be cringe-worthy pretension.
The problem is Amazon just lets anyone flag an eBook. It treats these random flaggings as signal to downgrade the book, directly costing the author sales.
The primary function of the system from Amazon’s POV is to keep costs down, meaning no customer service is required. Taken in that light it makes sense.
The reviewer's complaint: "Author has a non-English accent." I would understand if the author's speech was unintelligible but it wasn't.
Don't assume that because you can understand it, everyone can. I can understand several accents that most people struggle with, and I struggle a lot with a few accents that are fairly common. It's to do with exposure more than anything IMO.
I'm not out there leaving one star reviews, but I will drop a course in a heartbeat if the instructor has an accent that's difficult for me. I'm there to learn and barriers to that outside of the actual learning process are not worth my time.
That caused problems for me. I know how to read Chinese characters in more-or-less standard fonts. I wasn't really able to read the quirkier ones.
I always love it when I can change the font to suit my tastes.
> in which your messages are displayed to other people.
No.
the author seems to know they shouldn't be blaming the reader, but the whole tone of the twitter thread absolutely is blaming the reader. i don't know how you can read the linked thread and come away with an impression that the author isn't frustrated at the reader who reported the issues.
"It’s not your fault, Amazon doesn’t exactly advertise that if you make too many notes, the system informs the author they’re pulling the book."
"Proofreaders are awesome! Amazon has just found a way to punish authors with them."
"That’s the problem! It weaponized people’s desire to help by having a computer go “oh, this must mean the book is Bad.” It’s not your fault!"
Now there are also tweets that are more on the "exasperated" side, but the author pretty clearly doesn't blame the users so much as the system itself.
This is a multi-award winning author with incredibly strong ties to sf fan, including fan writer, communities and a huge professional network. But sure, she should be grateful Amazon is giving her amateur editorial advice and (thanks to this system, basically negative) exposure.
>It’s not your fault, Amazon doesn’t exactly advertise that if you make too many notes, the system informs the author they’re pulling the book.
And:
> That’s the problem! It weaponized people’s desire to help by having a computer go “oh, this must mean the book is Bad.” It’s not your fault!
The author blames Amazon:
> Sigh. I’m sure they thought they were helping, except all that really happens is that Amazon puts flags on the sales page to tell people it’s a terrible book and the author drowns in a morass of old files in a half dozen formats trying to fix things.
As I reader I would not expect that to be the outcome and if I knew that's what would happen, I would just try to contact the author directly.
The author explicitly does not say this:
https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/1209544781468180480
> Again, my dear proofreader friends, please don’t blame yourselves. Amazon doesn’t exactly explain that your desire to be helpful is telling a computer that Book Is Bad, Pull Bad Book.
Real hard to be grateful that your work is being published and read if people are clicking buttons that cause those works to get de-published and un-readable.
The "wisdom of the crowds" isn't. Your average commenter, even on HN makes a lot of basic English mistakes (I do my share too, but I try fixing when I have the chance).
Why? They did a pile of work and someone chose to purchase some of it. Are they somehow less deserving of respect than people in other lines of work?
(See my other comment[1]; it sounded to me too that the feedback was on text intentionally spelled with non-standard spellings, but that's different from a "typo".)
Was your friend able to use a program to diff (show all changes between) the two versions, and resolve them? Or was it done by hand?
It was along the lines of "Sure, I'm just Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford University, but what do I know about it?"
[1][2] I was going to link to two such books, but they're 404 dogs now, so I suppose the system does work in some cases - I left reviews to the effect of "don't buy this, these books are fake/ultra low quality" and they have since been removed.
Amazon is actively seeking to conmoditize publishing and therefore capture the share of profits (and gatekeeping power) previously captured by publishers, so the mechanism you suggest, while potentially viable as an interim measure, is ultimately contrary to their strategy.
People are willing to lower their expectations infinitely as long as it means lower prices. So the solution is: consumers need to reevaluate what they're willing to accept/spend, the rest will follow.
I've flagged things where errors in pronoun agreement has made things confusing, hoping that I'm making things better for the next reader. This should be an improvement on what we've lived with before. But it's not my intention to create a high priority work item for anyone...
- A word that was in boldface, except for the last letter.
- "downlike", which should have been "down like".
- A gloss of Han Wudi as the "marshal emperor" (should be "martial emperor").
- "teapoy", which I thought was a typo for "teapot". It wasn't! I learned this a few pages later, when the text mentioned gathering several things into the teapoy. But you can't unreport a typo.
Still, typo reporting is obviously a good idea, not a bad idea. The lesson is to develop workflows that accommodate it, not to stop flagging mistakes.
I've never knowingly come across that word before. Neat. I wonder what happened in the early 50's to make it so briefly popular?
...but isn't this the problem? People report things that they think are problems without taking the few moments to check the words. Teapoy is in all of my dictionaries.
so what's the proposed solution? 100% accurate user submissions, lest we get rid of the entire system?
these kind of systems are supposed to work through different tiers of people. The user reported submission is to be considered the least trustworthy, useful only for attracting the attention of someone who can make a responsible decision or correction.
the problem is that Amazon acts without the middle-man supervising whether or not the user has made a valid discovery -- they rely on non-expert users, some of which may have a vendetta.
If that's even vaguely true, you don't need 100% accurate user submissions. (Which, as you note, you can't have anyway.) That's the whole idea of a QA layer.
> What you’re doing if you flag a book as containing typos is, you tell a computer to yank the book off sale immediately. Nobody else can buy it until the author jumps through flaming hoops. Best of all? You might be misreading vernacular or British English or just plain wrong.
To the folks concerned about how to give feedback -- pressure Amazon to allow a better way. The current situation is much more analogous to e.g. reviews for rideshare drivers. Giving less than a 5 is potentially depriving someone of their livelihood. Unless that is specifically what you want to do, don't.
The fact that "literally" now figuratively has the same meaning as "figuratively" only adds confusion and limits the expressiveness of the language.
"Moreso" is just the author reaching for the most sympathetic example they can find.