Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
And let me tell you, before you all jump on me about how sucky typos are, and how bad some of those Indie books are, etc.: this is an unintended consequence of that mindset. I see this nonsense all the time on the KDP forums, with authors asking "how to notify their buyers" that they've uploaded changed manuscript #9 billion, because they think it is OKAY to do that. This idea, that the books are constantly fungible, constantly changeable, constantly update-able, has led to an entire world of authors who think it's OK to put a book up that is not finished, isn't ready, isn't suitable for primetime, because "it can be fixed later." So not only is this "fix-it" mindset a disservice to real publishers, but it's a disservice to the READERS, too, because you now have created a culture of authors who think that they can just fix whatever you find, while you freely crowdsource the editing and proofing that they should have had long before they pushed the "save and publish" button in the FIRST place.
Hitch
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Ah, yes-- this is a reflection of the software industry's modern take on software publishing-- why
pay someone to beta-test your product when the public will do it for you,
for free?
I agree, that formatting, spelling, grammatical errors &etc were around in print-books. I must admit that my esteem for an author goes south pretty quick when I find a glaring error within the first few pages. Even though I know it is usually not the wrriter's fault, but rather the publisher's.
I can recall one straight-to-paperback book where there was a a tangled-up mess of paragraph that took me hours to interpret-- a pretty strong author in his field, and far from his first novel (actually, I think it was the fourth in a series). I was able to remedy that in my eBook version, so next time I read it, things will go so much more smoothly through that section.
I don't
always fix every error I find... I reserve that side of my OCD for books I know I will read again. It's just too much work and impairs my enjoyment of the read even more (well, again, depending...) than trying to just ignore the ugly.