Amazon is insanely effective at cutting costs and passing those savings on to you, the user. But sometimes that means they'll crowdsource typo-finding and you'll miss out on a good book because someone without a high enough reading comprehension level flagged it as "has quality issues".
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.
The books I read are well-edited, but that doesn't mean that a glaring thing or two doesn't slip through.
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.
> which I thought was a typo for "teapot". It wasn't!
...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.
The message you get after reporting an error is "Thank you. A customer support specialist will look into this."
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.
If Amazon runs a service they should know that users are going to flood them with inaccurate reports, and so they shouldn't attach much if any weight to those reports.
So what am I supposed to do when I buy an ebook and it’s full of typos or OCR errors? Just suck it up? “Oh well, next time I just shouldn’t buy from MAJOR PUBLISHER?”
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.
I think Amazon should add a threshold and always have a human check the reported issues before setting up this flags that can do damage to the author. But if you look at youtube example the big companies don't care about the little guys.
Thats basically the function of an editor. That’s not a function that lends itself well to automated, hands-off processes.
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.
Yes, but in this cases you have users or algorithms to find potential problems and a human will check should be more economic that having an editor reading the entire book or watching the full video. Related to youtube is weird they do not have a trust system for channels with a larger reputation have a human double check the algorithm , it would at least reduce the bad publicity when you accuse a channel with many subscribers of ridiculous things that were not in the video.
> It’s sad it can be used to grief, but as a user it’s -> a out <- the only method I have of pointing out the issues and asking for them to be addressed
If someone genuinely spent the time to help catch errors in my manuscripts, I'd be thrilled. Editors are expensive!
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.
> That the author in question can't be bothered to keep a current copy of their manuscript ...
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?!)
The author might be managing the Amazon account, and I don't see the specific book mentioned so I can't check if Amazon says it's Red Wombat or something else, but she mentions getting the file back from Argyll (https://argyllproductions.com/) at one point. I'm pretty sure they are the actual publisher in the sense of preparing the final file, regardless of what Amazon thinks.
Argyll, Smashwords, and their ilk are self-publishing platforms. Think fanfic and the like. The author is ultimately responsible for everything. The publishers offer services in the $10-$50 range for style-setting an entire book, and you get what you pay for.
Unless there's something I'm missing, Argyll is a small press. Smashwords is more like a vanity press, which is what you describe. There's a huge difference between those two kinds of publishers, even if both give authors more responsibility than a traditional publisher.
"Self-publishing" is really orthogonal to both of those, though today most people would probably describe any vanity press as effectively self-published.
I’ve bought several of the authors published and self published ebooks, and they’re all generally done to a professional standard. I know that she uses freelance copy editors for the self published stuff.
In this case, (further down the thread) it was a dialect thing, so the whole problem was a false positive from an over zealous automated system on Christmas Eve, in prime panic ebook gifting time.
well, it was not about the case, but about the thriving service sector in GPs-link, where people are offering the service of formatting word-files for e-book export. Considering that self-publishing is probably in the 20$-wage-range, the authors could easily learn pandoc+git (or just use MS Word the right way), save that money for subsequent books AND (which is the most important thing) should have a workflow in place, where they actually can check for previous version/can edit the published version easily.
well, it's text-editor based and scores of people worked with similar systems successfully without being a nerd before Microsoft and IBM started to push for WYSIWIG because you could sell a new UI for that every year or two (and now the same people are selling SaaS because people stopped taking the bait...). Efficiency gains for actual users: noone knows, but people are making a lot of money, so it has to be something.
"But I don’t want to go among nerds,” HN user catalogia remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all nerds here. I’m a nerd. You’re a nerd.”
“How do you know I’m a nerd?” said they.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
Don't get me wrong, I like and use pandoc. But it's not the sort of tool anybody should expect the average author to be aware of. Maybe if it had a GUI it'd be more reasonable to expect the general public to use it.
She could be traveling for the holidays and away from her usual setup. Someone in the replies mentions having this happen to them while in rural Newfoundland for a funeral, equipped with only a cellphone and a spotty connection.
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.
A full book manuscript is tiny, and requires zero spinup whatsoever, unless you count opening a PDF or DOCX file as such. I have a copy of everything I've written over the past thirty years available immediately, and it would fit on a $4 thumb drive. If my career depended on it, I would be quite certain to have it with me at all times.
If a professional author doesn't think it might be important to keep copies of their work readily available, then I don't know what to tell them other than good luck.
Does “readily available” equate to “on your person at all times?” I’m sure the greats all did so before flash drives of sufficient capacity were available, right?
Should a professional accountant keep copies of all the tax returns they prepared, on a flash drive that’s with them at all times, in case a client gets audited? Should I keep a copy of every line of code I ever wrote? Where does this professional responsibility end for you?
I've written and published myself. Keeping manuscripts handy is part of the job. The problems mentioned in the twitter thread didn't exist before digital distribution, so what authors did beforehand is a bit of a non-sequitur. There were fewer of them, and the ones that made a living by it had real support on the business side of things, something vanishingly rare nowadays.
Accountants are required by law to maintain a minimum of seven years' worth of records for exactly that reason.
Fundamentally, if you want to sell a book you've written, no one is going to care more than you. That means that if you're a small, unsupported author (the vast majority of cases), it's on you to take care of the annoyances that come along for the ride. That's the nature of work. That flagging can be used as a form or harassment is a genuine problem- this is an inevitable side-effect of systems designed for pure automation, without a human in the loop to provide feedback. Over-reliance on automation is an issue that goes far beyond the world of publishing. That is orthogonal to the issue of being responsible for one's own creation, in terms of having needed resources on-hand.
Would you have your portfolio on your person at all times? Probably not, but you wouldn't go on a long trip without it. If you were actively working you'd have it available. If you didn't have it, you'd accept the risk of losing a contract or having your work temporarily withdrawn from sale. Maybe a bookseller would notice typos in your current edition and takes your book off the shelves until you can make a revised edition.
I mean, fundamentally, if you're saying your book needs to be on sale 24/7/365 then you need to be standing behind it 24/7/365 or paying a person or organisation to do that for you. If you want to take a break from the business of your book you should be prepared for Amazon to do the same.
I have a book that is generated from a sqlite database, and is dependent on a certain version range of Scribus and Lilypond. It would take me days to get a setup that would work for me to make changes to it, but it saved me years of work in the initial edition.
> A full book manuscript is tiny, and requires zero spinup whatsoever, unless you count opening a PDF or DOCX file as such.
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.
If you have to use an academic, LaTeX monstrosity as an example to even somewhat limit the number of books you can store for a few dollars, surely we can just agree that the cost of storage is inconsequential compared to what an author will produce over their career output?
I think it's reasonable to assume that if a store discovers a serious product defect, they should be able to expect the producer to respond in a short period of time or pull the product for sale. If the product is not important and never gets fixed, it never goes on sale. If other things take priority, it's off sale for a while and comes back. If it's the most urgent thing in the producer's business, it gets fixed immediately and never lapses.
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)
You are comparing apples and hand grenades here. Major publishers have a budget--but they also have account managers with Amazon who contact them if something goes sideways. This is somebody, whether intentionally or not, kicking an indie (she's got one publication through Simon and Schuster, the rest are Amazon self-publications) writer in the shins.
Indie writer isn't exactly right, she's a successful children's book author under her real name, with at least a dozen books out from Puffin. (Also a Hugo award winning comic book creator, but that was self-published.)
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.
The problem is not you the reporter. The problem is the automated Amazon system that processes your report and the obviously fucked up way it operates.
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.
>The problem is the automated Amazon system that processes your report and the obviously fucked up way it operates.
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.
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.
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.
> ... 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.
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.
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.
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.
funny you say that because revising is exactly what he did, so somehow he managed to get off his horse and push the uncommon vernacular out of the text
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...
It’s not above scrutiny, but it’s his choice to use it and it isn’t a definitively incorrect choice.
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.
as an aside I honestly doubt Amazon acted on a single word being flagged, because that level of scrutiny would be hurting its bottom line, but we only have one side of the story so we have to act upon that alone, still.
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
and? there are no laws that forbid grandstanding and loving money. Moreover those are his actions, the contradiction, or better yet hypocrisy, is on him. of course a description of the events would and should contain more of the same, since he's all barks but no bites to his feeding hand.
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?
never said that. what I said is that Amazon is mass market quality and know thy audience. if one wants to pursue artistry it's fine, but it's a different set of rules with a different product marketability
Yes, as an author, part of your job is to proofread your work. If this author published the work before it was actually ready, than I have zero sympathy for the author respective of the comments - next time publish quality work rather than blaming the readers. And yes, I know how hard it is to edit a publication, knowing several published writers - all of whom understand that editing is time consuming and much work, but simply part of the process in turning quality work.
Firstly the author isn't blaming readers, they're blaming Amazon. Secondly, if a typo is found in your work would you expect it to immediately be pulled from sale? What if there was no typo at all and the reader was mistaken? Is it fair to pull it from sale until the non-mistake is "resolved"? Can you not see how this is open to abuse?
Sure, but again - it's the same argument - the author should have taken enough pride in the manuscript to produce quality work to begin with. That's the root cause that put the author in this position.
No, but I think the tweeter is making the point that there should be a distinction between actual typos and slang/vernacular. Apparently, there isn't a distinction and his typo rate is thus artificially higher than it should be. Seems like a valid point to me -- there needs to be a distinction or at least some automated checking to ignore reports for informal words...
Also, what about books of the like of "A Clockwork Orange" or "1984", where the author defines their own vernacular? If you'd run either by a standard spelling/grammar checker such as those included with Word, both of the aforementioned books would be flagged, despite both being highly regarded classics.
Great point, that's something an automated checker wouldn't catch. Sounds like an opportunity for crowdsourcing. As a simple example, the interface could allow a user to report typos and view any other reported typos, then submit upvotes/downvotes on previously reported typos.
Apparently, a user flagged the word "moreso" as being a typo. According to the author, not only is this report erroneous (because "moreso" is actually a colloquial word), but it automatically resulted in the author's book being flagged on its sale page as having quality issues.
I suspect that a report of one typo isn't enough to cause that. (And the tweet does say "whoever flagged the typos", not "whoever flagged one spurious typo".)
"Moreso" is just the author reaching for the most sympathetic example they can find.
Man it's a shame that this system is having undesired consequences for the author, but the whole thread just reeks of pretentious entitlement.
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.
I concur. The user provides feedback through the obvious interface they see, and the author blames the user. If it had started from a place of empathy, maybe it'd have the desired effect, but it doesn't for me. Maybe the author could have blamed the system, or raised the issue with Amazon, but starting off blaming the user sounds silly.
I'm not sure how the both of you can interpret the author's words the way you have.
> 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 understand different people have different perspectives but, to me, it still reads condescending towards the reader. As if the author were saying something along the lines of:
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.
> As if the author were saying something along the lines of:
I know you're trying to help, but don't do that. You're not being helpful because you don't know well enough.
That isn’t what the author said, but that is an accurate assessment of the situation.
those quotes you mention, while generally hinting towards Amazon's broken system, directly address the reporting individual -- unless i'm to believe that someone internal to Amazon reported it.
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..
That's a shifted goalpost argument. GGP talks about "blame", you downgrade this to "addressing".
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.
Yes and no. Even if they are acting with good intentions, it's still causing negative consequences for the author. I can understand it would be especially frustrating if the "correction" was incorrect.
I came away with the opposite interpretation. The author never blames the readers for doing this. The author even fully understands that the system is designed to help readers to be "helpful" in this regard, but the system is clearly misguided. And in this case it's not even a typo, the "bug submitter" has incorrectly identified a bug which has saddled the author with a potential loss in sales because of the "low quality" rating it can immediately imbue.
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.
> 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
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.
Flagging "moreso" as a typo is cringe-worthy pretension in the most literal sense - it is someone pretending to be a helpful editor and in the process causing the author to cringe as they are required to perform useless labor.
You dont get low quality flag for one typo. Author chose to only share "moreso" in a bid to garner sympathy. Others joining in complain about being forced, oh shock and horror, to fix ordinary typos (like missing letters) in their flawless creations.
Did you not read the part of the thread where authors are already reporting abuse of this system to harass them?
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.
It seems like you're the one with the entitlement mentality here. I fail to see why the author should feel good about someone who doesn't understand their work being able to cripple their sales, howbeit inadvertently.
> 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.
Tangentially, QQ lets you customize the font in which your messages are displayed to other people. Some people express their personality by choosing quirky or fun fonts.
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.
>The author never blames the readers for doing this.
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.
I think blaming the reader is Ok, having easy access to the tools to do something doesn't automatically exclude you of all responsibility after using it, if that reader had asked a friend "Hey do you think this is a typo?" they would have been more likely to know it was not.
> These authors should start from a position of gratefulness that their work is being published and read.
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.
I think the author is very explicit that they aren't blaming users:
>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.
The author clearly blames Amazon multiple times for not making clear the connection between action (reader marks typos) and outcome (book gets "low quality" label and makes busywork for author).
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.
> 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.
> These authors should start from a position of gratefulness that their work is being published and read.
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.
They're not acting in bad faith (probably) but they shouldn't try to fix things that aren't broken or they aren't an expert in.
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).
Kindly note that I am responding to the specific assertion I quoted, rather than complaining about anyone pointing out flaws. If you have some beef with an 'SJW worldview' that seems like your problem, rather than mine.
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here, especially not name-calling ones or shallow dismissals. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think you are the one coming with pretencious entitletement, pretending you can give power to third party actors so unreliable as the average consumer and not expect to waste the time of thousands of authors; such power should be much more tightly controlled and Amazon knows that, maybe something like a dashboard where you can specify why the "typo" is there so next time someone reports it as such they can read why is it actually not a typo, and only _then_ can someone report it again and only _then_ get real consequences such as flags next to the book and other actions that economically damage the authors.
That's not how I was interpreting the tweets. The author is fine with the feedback on their writing; what they're not fine with is an automated system tagging their work as "low quality" if enough erroneous feedback (or subjective feedback that perhaps the author disagrees with) is submitted.
(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".)
I was not even aware that this flag existed. I've seen a couple of truly bum books on Amazon[1][2], and I suppose that this is meant to catch them, but there ought to be some sort of middle ground where publishers can agree with amazon not to publish shovel-lit, and amazon will agree to give them the benefit of the doubt.
[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.
> but there ought to be some sort of middle ground where publishers can agree with amazon not to publish shovel-lit, and amazon will agree to give them the benefit of the doubt.
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.
I’m a huge kindle reader (hours a day) and never noticed. I generally just highlight and make a note saying “typo” if it’s an entertaining or jarring one, as some of the authors I read ask for mistakes to be emailed in so they can correct it (and some even give you free copies of their books if you do so).
Flagging of content errors is definitely available in the phone app. I don't keep my Kindle connected to the internet, so I have to pull out the phone whenever I find one.
I think when people say "literally" to emphasize a point, that isn't fluid.. it disrupts the flow of the conversation because in my head I call them an idiot. People who claim spell checks because they can't understand turns of phrases are the problem.
Ursula Vernon is the author of Digger [0], a graphic novel which won a Hugo in 2012. If anyone feels moved by this to support an independent artist, I can vouch for it as a great read.
A friend who works in academia published a book with a major university press. The press had someone (in another country) do copy edits, and it came back with all of the historical language "corrected" to modern English. It's as if they ran it through a standard spell checker and just picked the closest replacement for every single word that came up. Since there was no redline provided, it took my friend hours to go back and fix all of their errors (there were other formatting changes that had to stay, otherwise they could have just reverted to the prior version).
> Since there was no redline provided, it took my friend hours to go back and fix all of their errors (there were other formatting changes that had to stay, otherwise they could have just reverted to the prior version).
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?
> 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.
This should be solved like the "bad backlinks" problem in SEO - a disavow mechanism. The author should be able to simply reject edits/flags as he sees fit.
The downside to self-publishing is that since one lacks a trusted editor, one is at the mercy of systems intended to control for the lack of a trusted editor.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadPeople 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.
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.
Should a professional accountant keep copies of all the tax returns they prepared, on a flash drive that’s with them at all times, in case a client gets audited? Should I keep a copy of every line of code I ever wrote? Where does this professional responsibility end for you?
Accountants are required by law to maintain a minimum of seven years' worth of records for exactly that reason.
Fundamentally, if you want to sell a book you've written, no one is going to care more than you. That means that if you're a small, unsupported author (the vast majority of cases), it's on you to take care of the annoyances that come along for the ride. That's the nature of work. That flagging can be used as a form or harassment is a genuine problem- this is an inevitable side-effect of systems designed for pure automation, without a human in the loop to provide feedback. Over-reliance on automation is an issue that goes far beyond the world of publishing. That is orthogonal to the issue of being responsible for one's own creation, in terms of having needed resources on-hand.
I mean, fundamentally, if you're saying your book needs to be on sale 24/7/365 then you need to be standing behind it 24/7/365 or paying a person or organisation to do that for you. If you want to take a break from the business of your book you should be prepared for Amazon to do the same.
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?
"Moreso" is just the author reaching for the most sympathetic example they can find.
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".)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21876500
[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.
The fact that "literally" now figuratively has the same meaning as "figuratively" only adds confusion and limits the expressiveness of the language.
[0] http://diggercomic.com/
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?"
> 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 kindle store has been around 12 years.
Amazon tracks what you read and when and other "book reads you" stuff you can't turn off.
You can highlight passages in any book. Amazon will share this with the world via popular highlights.
But, trivial as it sounds, you cannot highlight a typo or grammatical error.
This would clean up the books, quietly and offline, but amazon doesn't do it.
12 years kindle has been around.