Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
If you report books to Amazon for typos, they will sometimes pull the book down until the publisher updates a corrected version. I imagine that is a pretty good incentive...
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Yes: but it has to have some pretty good number thereof. The long and short of it is, a reader has to have complained; the reader has to have said that the vast number of typos impaired their ability to enjoy the book, and then Amazon will send a list of typos to the author, and ask--not tell--them to fix it.
IF a book is put up that is just unreadably bad, Amazon will remove it from sale until fixed, but there seems to be no realistic, logical, pattern-recognizable methodology for this. I had a client (I've told this story here) that had a book that was an anthology of character studies. Instead of an inline TOC called, "TOC," she had "Cast of Characters." The doofi (doofuses) at Amazon actually removed it from sale until she "fixed" it, and I gave them what for on that, as the book met the tech specs, the CoC was set as the TOC on the Guide, and those geniuses didn't have the sense to LOOK at the thing to see that on the GoTo, it went to the "Cast of Characters" and figure it out from there.
I posted here on MR recently that while I am certainly
no fan of typos, I think the craze for fixing every little typo in a BOOK has done no one any favors, particularly the authors OR the readers. I said, and I stand by the idea, that this concept that books can be fixed
instantly leads writers to think that it's okay to put up substandard work and "fix it later," or that a book isn't a fixed (as in, completed, not as in repaired) creation, but rather, a WIP posted on Amazon et al for a form of crowd-sourcing editing and proofing. This means that we, the readers, get stuck with crap that should never have been published, and it's considered acceptable. Don't believe me? Read the Amazon forums, and see how on nearly every "need editing" post they talk about how they'll "get it edited after some sales when I can afford it." Or the authors who "help" others with "republishing" and "updating" their books, bragging about how they've updated theirs "
ten times."
This is a DIRECT result of the whole silly, self-satisfied cycle of "reader finds typo, reader complains about typo, publisher races to satisfy need for
instant gratification of reader and fixes typo, rinse-repeat." NONE of us would have done this 10 years ago, nor would we do it NOW with print books. We wouldn't, and we all know it.
This whole system does nothing but reinforce the idea that digital books are nothing more than Word documents, typed any which way. I find it really vexing. I personally won't bother to fix any typo I find in a book I've purchased; why should/would I?
I wouldn't take a John Sandford hardback down to a copy shop, whiteout a typo, type over it, copy the book and rebind it, would I?
No, I'd infer what was intended and read on. Nor would I send the publisher a list of typos. I mean, when did this "send the publisher a list of typos" mindset even
start?
I find this
fix every typo in Calibre and Sigil thing kind of obsessive, to tell the truth, particularly for one's own library. I mean, how many times are you going to re-read something? Would 5 typos in 100K words really kill off the whole book?
If it bugs you (generally--I'm not addressing anyone individually or specifically) so much that you feel like you have to break the DRM, put it in Sigil/Calibre, fix it, well, great if that's what makes you happy, but what type of numbers are we talking about here? (I can see that the "Hid#233;" thing
would, indeed, annoy me to the point of making Amazon or whomever take it back and tell them I wanted a fixed copy.) Do we mean 10 typos per book? 100? In how many words? What's really a valid number to complain to a publisher? And, bigger question: would you return the book if the same typos were in the print edition? Because that's MY standard. Just because MR'ers think it's easy for an author to fix a book doesn't mean that's so. Not everyone makes their own books.
I certainly found more than 20 typos in Annie Lamott's
Bird By Bird, when it came out in MOBI. It neither scarred me for life nor impaired my ability to enjoy the book. I didn't complain to the publisher, nor post bad reviews about the formatting. There were patent formatting errata, as well; broken paragraphs, and the like. Somehow, I suffered through. ;-)
I don't know...again,
if people see books that are rife with typos and formatting errors, they certainly should complain. But reporting 2 typos, (like the story I told about our superstar author's 350K-word novel), 1 of which wasn't even a typo, but a Brit spelling, and complaining about that to Amazon seems petty. And I don't believe that most of it is trying to "help" the author or the publisher. In that instance, certainly, it felt supercilious; a type of showing off. (n.b.: this type of
supercilious showing off seems to have emerged as a consequence of both the advent of user reviews AND self-publishing. It seems that now that
everyone is both a reviewer AND an author, they feel the need to indulge in some type of schadenfreude-based nitpicking of typos in other author's books. This is merely a theory of mine, obviously; worth what you paid for it, natch.)
And the "showing off" thing isn't intended to apply to anyone here on MR. Not the same crowd at all.
@Cyb: the font thing...sometimes you can talk them out of it, sometimes you can't. I have a book in right now with {sigh}, NINE fonts. NINE. Oish.
Hitch