Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
Well... If they are making business with ebooks, and they want customers to buy ebooks from them, they should be able to provide quality ebooks. If they can't, they should stop selling them, or at least charging more than $1.
If they can't fix the errors themselves and have to pay $50 to someone else, so be it, they made much more than that by selling the error-laden ebook first. It's not the fact that there are errors that annoys me, it's the apparent total unwillingness to even pay attention to them.
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Jellby:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. C'mon, now, we all know that while BPH's are in trouble, they're still making the vast majority of their money in print, and in
curating new talent. And, as I said--they make the same mistakes in print, you don't expect them to re-issue it, do you? No, you don't. You don't because it's not financially feasible. And why do you think that "they made much more than that by selling the error-laden ebook first?" You don't know that. You assume it; but if the book was backlist, they paid someone to scan it and OCR it (expensive when done properly); they paid someone to proof it; they paid someone to make it; they paid for a new cover, etc., etc., etc. Frankly, all of you guys aren't thinking this through, because many of you take PG titles (which are already scanned and in SOME type of format, however bad) and make ePUBs, and you think, "well, that's all there is to it," (with no disrespect to your obvious mad epub-making skills) and you don't think about
all the other aspects that have to go into the making of a
commercial title.
If a BPH gets one email from one guy, who says, "gosh, I found these 15 errors in Love's Savage Fury," then they'll stick the letter in LSF's folder and, when the book gets a new cover, or gets a new preface, or they need to redo the authors' "Other Books" page, they roll the edits in then. If they get 200 letters from readers, they'll do it sooner. Like everything else in the commercial world, it's a balance of cost versus demand. If the book gets returned by 500 people, they'll redo the book. Bitching about it here certainly isn't going to change it; like everything in the universe, book publishing obeys the laws of physics--action/reaction. Greatest amount of randomness, least amount of effort, etc., etc., etc. Expecting a publisher to leap through a hoop based on one or even ten emails is, frankly, unrealistic, and unless it was a crucial, book-altering plot error, if I had a client with only 10-15 emails about some typos, I'd tell him to wait an additional six months--get them all when he can, and when he's made some more money to cover the costs. Publishing is a
business. it's about making
MONEY. Don't kid yourself for one second that it's about "making art." It's not.
And I think that it's unfair, generally, to claim that all ebooks or even the vast majority (produced by REAL companies, not the Fly By Night PD scrapers that infest Amazon) are "error-laden." Maybe I've been lucky, like Diap, but as I said, the most error-infested book I've had was Annie Lamott's Bird By Bird (which I thought was funny, actually, given the topic), which had maybe 10-15 typos and a missing line (and, FWIW, that book
was reissued by the publishers with the typos cleaned up, mind you); the usual lower-down-the-food-chain books I buy in Urban Supe fiction like Simon Green or the Dresdens seem fine, as do the higher-ups, like John Sandford et al in genre fiction, as well as Literary Fiction. And believe me--you're talking to a woman whose eyes search constantly for errors by default, even when I do
not want them to.
Like I said: I think that there is an intense
demand that eBooks get fixed near-instantly, when no one would consider that for a second for their print counterparts. I do think that while some of you wouldn't give those typos a second thought if you encountered them in print, you feel
aggrieved if you encounter them on your (insert reading device here). I don't really know why that is; but you do. I suspect it's because you yourselves make ePUBs, and thus you think it's easy to fix; but I also do believe that there is a digital mindset out there that every file is instantly editable and fixable, so that this sort of instant gratification should apply to ebooks, too. It is, to my mind, an unreasonable standard, and I think it actually causes publishers to resent ebook readers. I don't think this mindset is helping the cause of getting better ebooks; just the other day one of my imprints sent me a title to fix, for a moderately well-known author, and they commented that "it won't help, of course, because we'll get the usual rabidly angry emails from those people with Nooks and Kindles, anyway, if, G-d forbid, they find a typo." If anything, it's making them
less enthusiastic about making fixes, because they fear that next month, someone will point out that the heroine's car was blue in Chapter 4 and red in Chapter 7, and they'll have to fix that, too--instantly.
It's not just the readers, either; we encounter this same mindset with our authors, who think that we should make copyedits on their titles 5-8 times without charging, or edit and remake the Kindle book 5 times without any fees. There's definitely a brain pattern engendered through digital editing, in Word processors, that encourages/implants the idea that if you can make an edit and hit "save," that means that redoing EVERYTHING IS EASY. I think that the discussion here is simply an extension of that same concept. {shrug}.
For what it's worth, that's my $.02,
Hitch