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Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

Amazon lets potential clients know of problems with the merchandise, what a terrible system indeed!

The problematic part isn’t that they’re notified—that’s the expected behavior. The problem is that the book is pulled automatically without waiting for the author to respond. That wouldn’t be so bad if there were a lot of valid issues, but anyone can get a book pulled maliciously just by reporting a bunch of “mistakes”—which, as was demonstrated here, need not be actual mistakes.

Pulling a book because of a typo is also a unreasonable overreaction. It would be better without typos, but I'd still rather read a book with a typo than not having the book at all. This is even more of an overreaction than it would be to pull software that has any bugs whatsoever.

Edit: typos

> ... I'd still rather read a book with a typo than not having the book at all.

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.

According to tweets they get at least 5 days. I wouldnt be surprised if Amazon is prescreening user generated reports wits some basic NLP checker to filter out trolls/missclicks.

Considering how bad Amazon is at screening fake reviews, I actually would be surprised.

Authors could also use an automated system that processes these complaints, applies them unilaterally to the manuscript (false positive non-typos be damned) and uploads a modified version.

That seems even more abuse-prone.

Yes. I still don't understand why Wikipedia doesn't fall apart. But pretty sure it doesn't.

Only because there are a number of people who monitor all the pages. It couldn’t (currently) be done with an automated setup, as shown by the legion of bots that monitor as well and still don’t do a perfect job.

Right on empowering random Amazon users to edit one's book with no oversight. The customer always knows best.

It doesn't really matter. Amazon is happy, the customer is happy, sales are coming in, and when the book finally does not make any sense whatsoever, the original version can be uploaded.

My reading of the tweets was that whomever was flagging the "typos" wasn't flagging actual typos, rather, that they were flagging words intentionally spelled the way they were to convey some regional dialect. Sometimes, things are spelled in a certain manner that is non-standard to convey an accent or mannerism of a character in a fictional work.

> "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.

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