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Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
FYI: I just received a reply from author Jack McDevitt, relating the reply he received from Harper Collins when he forwarded my complaint to them. (It was about 2 of his books, both of which had egregious errors from unproofed OCR copy.)
They stated to Jack that "the process is farmed out," meaning, I suppose, the scan and OCR of older books into ebooks. Naturally they expressed regret to Jack, who assured me they are "uncomfortable when they hear from unhappy readers." (I guess they were so uncomfortable that they couldn't bring themselves to contact me directly...)
Jack's letter to me doesn't reveal anything about Harper Collins' plans to fix the problem. Do they even have plans to fix the problem? Only the shadow knows...
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Jack McDevitt is a terrific guy and a fine writer, and it's a shame his books got caught in the works of careless and incompetent production. I winced a little when I saw that you'd left a 1-star review because of the poor production quality. That's likely to hurt Jack more than it hurts the publisher. Even if you explained the reason in your review, the net effect is to drag down the overall star-rating on the book--possibly carried over onto the rating for the paper edition--and that's apt to get noticed more than your stated reasons. I have no doubt that Jack wants the best for his readers, but I doubt that he has any control over the ebook production.
I don't know how many stars you would have given the book if the production had been impeccable. But I wonder if a better solution, if you want to note displeasure with bad production on a good book, wouldn't be to reduce the rating by one star, with an explanation of the reason. You could make your point without killing the author. (And writing a letter, of course, is always a good idea.)