Quote:
Originally Posted by sjkramer
Speaking as a publisher, I know that Amazon will certainly pass along a typo report, even with just one or two "typos" without actually taking away the buy button. I put typos in quotes, because it's not unheard of for a reader to be wrong, or to call something a typo that's just, say, an antiquated spelling. On the other hand, we're always grateful when someone politely reports an error—whether in a print or ebook.
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Yes, they do. But let's ask ourselves:
Does anyone here--anyone--really think that they're passing those along to Random House? Soho? Any other BPH?
Hell, no, they aren't. That's bollocks-wocky. Not until/unless the book is "unreadable," and I have that on more-than-fairly-good-authority. So it's the little imprints and publishers and indies that get them. Almost all the
major complaints that I hear about 'round the Net are a) BPH books, that were, natch, sent off to India to be scanned and converted, and nobody back home ran an eye over them, and b) PD books that either came through early Gutenberg or from half-assed DIY scans, and are crap-city anyway.
Now, that doesn't mean that the Indies can't put up some real whoppers; I got so angry with Amazon over (aforementioned famous-as-the-universe client) a thing with two typos that I pointed out not less than 3 indy-pubbed books that certainly weren't scans, nor produced offshore, but were simply unreadable. I mean, so rife with typos, grammar and punctuation issues, etc., that you couldn't make it through the first two paragraphs without gagging. UN-readably bad. (Not being a pedant. Unreadable for a 2nd-grader).
I told AMZ that I'd happily fix the two typos from Herself if and when they did something about books THAT bad. IMHO, if Amazon decides that they've appointed themselves the "Indy Book Quality Police," then they should do the ENTIRE damned job, because the absurdity of the IBQP is that it's only the books that are getting READ that are receiving reports. The books that are utter horse-poop are being ignored, go unread, and never get any "reports" about how every other word is misspelt, etc. That's RIDICULOUS. And, worse, it's selective enforcement. It's worse than crowd-sourcing editing, about which I've already ranted.
I've already made my point, I hope, about how badly served the reading public is by the IBQP making "republishing" and redoing and reuploading subpar content acceptable. Not to mention, enabling the
already-absurd instant-gratification-entitlement mentality that's pandemic enough as it is. Now, we have selective enforcement--only on books that are actually popular--so that
the really lousy books get NO enforcement. HUNH?
If Amazon says, "yup, we're the IBQP," great. Then they should do the ENTIRE job, and make sure that every book that's up there is at least readable. It doesn't have to be great storytelling, but it should at least be readable by someone with an at-least 6th-grade-education. This whole "oh, we'll enforce our [utterly unstated anywhere] WRITING QUALITY standards when some wanker complains" attitude seems peremptory and high-handed to me. And I LOVE Amazon, don't get me wrong, for many, many reasons; but this part of the self-publishing game is just...it's ridiculous. (And many--many--of the "typo" or "grammar police" reports I've seen
are simply WRONG.)
</rant>
Hitch