Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Hitch
It rocked Harper Collins' world, which not only replaced every instance of Reamde on every Kindle and device out there (which had a purchased copy on it), but actually pulled the book while they fixed it--while the book was #4 in print, #6 in SciFi/Kindle and #36 in books overall. So...being adamantine WORKS. You guys are certainly vociferous enough here; now be vociferous where it will do some good.
|
I agree completely with the idea of returning sub-par products... and I applaud HC for pulling REAMDE and fixing and replacing purchased copies. But having been able to compare the original and the revised version of that title, I just hope the early U.S. REAMDE version isn't truly considered an example of "atrocious, shameful formatting" by a "publisher that just doesn't care." Because in my opinion... the glitches were pretty trivial (no OCR errors that I know of); for all the outrage they seemed to produce. The outcry was disproportionate to the number of mistakes (IMO, again). Not that customers didn't deserve a new, fixed copy, but there are/were certainly more egregious examples of consumers being charged a premium for sub-par products out there that could serve to rally the troops
There's a "potato-pile!" effect when it comes to this sort of thing, and while it can be effective and produce results... I just don't like to see it used on titles that people wouldn't think twice about had they paid for the physical book and run into the same errors. Because honestly... I'm getting the impression that ebooks are being held to a
higher standard, due
exactly to the
"you're making money hand-over-fist when ebooks cost nothing to produce" mentality).
So definitely rage against, and return, the "atrociously formatted" book (be it paper or electronic), but at the same time, let's keep the rage proportional to the actual atrocity. Keep in mind that there are mistakes in physical books that are corrected in later printings too. Those mistakes sometimes made those earlier "atrociously formatted" books more valuable to collectors.
