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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ironic typo?
Wait... What am I supposed to be parsing for again?
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?