Amazon 'suppresses' book with too many hyphens

[drjenkins]

http://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...r-2-moonstruck

I can't help thinking that part of the story is missing here. Does anyone here think that Amazon would pull a 90,000 word book because of 100 properly hyphenated words? I suspect the actual notice from Amazon addressed a list of concerns and the author singled out the hyphen issue for his counter complaint.

[HomeInMyShoes]

There might be more to it, but the comments are side-splitting funny.

Originally Posted by AmazonReview

13 years ago, I was in a major car accident that killed my friend and left me in ICU for several days. I've struggled with insomnia, chronic back pain, and severe hyphen intolerance since that summer. Life was bleak. Is it even worth living if I have to share the world with authors who use hyphens? When I learned that Amazon was finally enforcing hyphenic genocide, it was like the clouds finally parted to reveal that the sun was still shining. I look forward to reading the corrected versions of The Tell-Tale Heart, The Demon-Haunted World, and Heart-Shaped Box, among other affronts to the sovereignty of my mind space.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by drjenkins

http://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...r-2-moonstruck

I can't help thinking that part of the story is missing here. Does anyone here think that Amazon would pull a 90,000 word book because of 100 properly hyphenated words? I suspect the actual notice from Amazon addressed a list of concerns and the author singled out the hyphen issue for his counter complaint.

There's a lot more to the story, yes. It turns out he was hard coding a minus sign in place of a hyphen.
http://the-digital-reader.com/2014/1...emicolon-next/

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

There's a lot more to the story, yes. It turns out he was hard coding a minus sign in place of a hyphen.
http://the-digital-reader.com/2014/1...emicolon-next/

Now the question becomes ... why would someone use a minus sign instead of a dash?

[murg]

Originally Posted by rcentros

Now the question becomes ... why would someone use a minus sign instead of a dash?

They're dashlexic?

[ApK]

Originally Posted by rcentros

Now the question becomes ... why would someone use a minus sign instead of a dash?

In addition to the text-to-speech issue mentioned in the article, could the minus sign also screw up actual hyphenation in some reflows? I could see how having multiple hyphens in words, or weird line breaks would be a problem, especially if he didn't just use a lot of hyphenated terms, but took it upon himself to hyphenate at the end of lines, but I don't know if that is actually the case or not.

[ShellShock]

Do keyboards generally have a dash key?

[ApK]

Originally Posted by ShellShock

Do keyboards generally have a dash key?

No, but book formatting software always has a mechanism for doing it properly.

Even word processors like MS Word will often replace the minus symbol with an appropriate dash or hyphen depending on context.

[Terisa de morgan]

If you're gloating that you're an IT expert, and you make your books from scratch (html), as he has said at some comment, you don't know this?

[ShellShock]

So which of the various unicode hyphen/dash glyphs does Amazon find acceptable as a hyphen?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by rcentros

Now the question becomes ... why would someone use a minus sign instead of a dash?

I though a minus sign and a dash were the same thing. How are they not the same thing?

[keeska]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I though a minus sign and a dash were the same thing. How are they not the same thing?

In the days prior to computer keyboards when books were typset character sets were devised which had more characters then are directly available on a computer keyboard. There is a lot of history involved but the minus and the hyphen are distinct characters differing in size as well as spacing before and after they symbol.

The double quote beginning a quotation is different from the double quote used at the end. Both are different from the double quote on the keyboard. The single quote on the keyborad also differs from the typeset single quote.

There are other examples. Note that professional web publishing (html) also makes use of the extended character sets. The goal of all of this is to make sure the text looks as good as is possible on the page or screen and is as easy to read as possible.

[WillAdams]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I though a minus sign and a dash were the same thing. How are they not the same thing?

They're not the same thing 'cause they're different characters:

hyphen - (ASCII 45) used to indicate that a hyphen should persistently appear, like en- and em-dashes is vertically placed so as to harmonize w/ lowercase text, unless in a range of all caps.
soft hyphen (ISO 8859: 0xAD, Unicode U+00AD) used to indicate an allowable hyphenation point
en-dash – (ASCII 0150 (on a PC), U+2013; – – –) --- used to indicate duration, or certain linguistic forms
em-dash — (ASCII 0151 (on a PC), U+2014; — — —) --- used to indicate a pause / break in thought as well as various other typographic usages
minus − (U+2212; − − −) --- used to indicate subtraction or a negative. Sets higher than minus, en or em dash so as to align w/ lining figures

[JSWolf]

In Windows Character Map, a dash is also called Hyphen-Minus. Yes, I see that a specific minus is a different character. But, a minus can also be the same as a dash/hyphen.

[tompe]

Will the minus mess up dictionary look-up?