[Hitch]

Man, you could feel the condescension just dripping in that article, couldn't you?

I actually wrote about this, in our most recent newsletter, mostly due to the Stephenson Reamde debacle. We've had two authors that received notes from Amazon, telling them to clean up their books; in one, Amazon (wrongly) said that his errors were typical of OCR (book wasn't OCR'd, and they identified a single error) and the other was written deliberately in an incoherent fashion. I did, absolutely and strenuously, warn the author before we converted it that I thought he'd run into trouble, although I actually thought it would be bad reviews. I presume reader complaints about the incoherent chapters (yes...chapters) prompted Amazon to take the action they did, which was to literally yank the book until he rewrote those sections.

Which takes you to a whole new topic, which isn't curation inasmuch as it is editorial interference, but that could be a discussion for another day.

It's absurd, and wrong, to say that "ebooks cost nothing to produce." Sure, if an author formats his document exactly correctly, and does the entire production himself, his cost is only his time, but that has value. If he pays someone--like us--to produce the book, he's out that money. If he pays someone to proof his ms before he submits it, he's paid that money. There seems to be a general idea (which is particularly surprising here, of all places) that ebooks manifest magically, like Pegasus and Chrysaor springing, full-blown, from the head of Medusa.

Sure, if you're making a print book, and simultaneously making the ebook, the additional costs are extremely low; but they're still not free. Even if made from the print files, the books have to be produced (and anyone here who thinks that there are $5/book workers out there, in WHATEVER country--try to find one.); they have to be proofed, separate and apart from whatever is going on with the DT version; etc. Many people don't know this, but some of the largest ebook producers in the world will not accept edits, at all, post-production. None. Ergo, GIGO, not to mention any conversion errors. I've been approached by most of them, but the "no edits after the epub is produced" attitude put me off using them for our overflow. Our authors would go grawlixes. I have authors that have cared so much about their titles that they've rewritten chunks and actually had us re-produce the titles, rather than have a title out there with errors, mistakes, what-have-you.

But on a super-large scale, like one of the big houses (say Random House), I can't imagine how they'd proof all those titles. I really don't. It's easy to say "oh, they're lazy," but putting out really good ebooks isn't significantly easier than putting out a good print title; and proofing one doesn't replace proofing the other--and as someone else pointed out, a good proofing can run $750-$3500 or more.

I'm not actually taking a side in the argument...just thinking aloud...and while I have seen some really painful errors in Big Publishing titles, I do lean toward the idea that the surfeit of self-publishing DIY titles, widely distributed through whatever sources (SW, Amazon, Nook) are adding to the notion that eBooks are "all" badly formatted. I know ours aren't; but I don't wear the author's typos, either...and the distinction between "bad formatting" and "bad editing" is often confused in reviews, which I've seen myself.

At our place, the publisher is responsible, period, for proofing his/her own work, whether they're an imprint or a self-pub. We recommend proofers to them if they want them--but a lot don't. People, like everything else in the universe, obey the laws of physics...greatest amount of randomness and the least amount of energy...so it's often easier to NOT proof the book. At the end of the day, I think the only force in play that will make publishers respect the readers as much as they ought is for angry readers to RETURN THE BOOKS to the vendors and force the issue.

MHO, FWIW.

Hitch