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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

When there are discussions about Hachette, one often sees writers saying "Amazon gives me more of the cover price, and gets my book into people's hands faster, what's the downside?"

I guess this is the downside.

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As someone who has been using a Kindle for almost all my book reading in the last few years, the major publishers don't care. Doesn't matter what I read it tends to have quite a few OCR errors and other mistakes that clearly exist for the print edition (extra hyphens) or 'correcting' things that used to be hyphenated (by removing the hyphen that needs to be there).

My new Kindle has the ability to let me report typos and other content errors.

I've been using that feature A LOT. I've reported 13 content errors in the last month, and I'm not reading all that much, just a few hundred pages in that time.

Agreed. It's worse for technical books in my experience. The last few I've bought have had unreadable code samples and screwed up or just plain missing contents pages. It's got to the point where I'm going back to buying paper textbooks.

Legitimate query: anyone know if the author receives those reader-reported issues directly?

From reading the original article here, it seems they receive a notice of the reports, not the actual reports, which I would assume Amazon does to protect readers from retaliation (?), and after Amazon has reviewed the report and checked for themselves. At least that was the feeling I got from the original article.

I've been using the highlighting feature on errors in order to appease my OCD. The fact that Amazon has added error reporting seems like a hopeful sign and an admission that there is a widespread problem. The question is, are they actually going to make the fixes?

I've heard of books being taken down (such as in this case) and even refunds being issued, but I wonder if it really matters.

When I asked about the feature on /r/kindle they said it had been around since the Paperwhite or so, yet books are still riddled with things that even a basic spell check would catch.

Amazon doesn't seem to be holding publisher's feet to the fire.

Are you suggesting that Hachette has no standards and/or formatting rules for the books they publish?

Surely not.

i think he's suggesting that Hachette has sane standards and formatting rules, instead of running your book against a dictionary and counting the hyphens.

And your evidence that's what Amazon is doing would be?

From what I'm seeing here (and on the site) a customer complained about bad hyphenation. Amazon pulled up the book, and, sure enough, it has some bad hyphenation.

That's not at all the same as algorithmically rejecting a book based on hyphen count.

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