Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
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Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
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Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#2And this is why we used to deal with monopolies so harshly. Alas. I wonder when our country will start working in the citizens' favour?
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#3My guess is that the majority of complaints Amazon gets about hyphenation in ebooks are due to poorly converted ebooks, where line-breaking hyphens from a print-formatted source file have accidentally made their way into the ebook. Amazon support is generally not set up spend more than 5 seconds looking at your email, so I surmise that they've filed it into the "yeah fix your ebook hyphens" category and are not reading carefully enough to realize that they've misfiled it.
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#4When there are discussions about Hachette, one often sees writers saying "Amazon gives me more of the cover price, and gets my book into people's hands faster, what's the downside?"
I guess this is the downside.
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#5And this is why we used to deal with monopolies so harshly. Alas. I wonder when our country will start working in the citizens' favour?
Huh? This has nothing to do with monopolies and everything to do with the volume of crap e-books that Amazon is wading through. Unfortunately, the OP happened to get caught up in one of Amazons filters and their first level CS is clueless.
Monopoly or not, this is a hard problem and one that we see in other places like Google search or Apple's app store. Gaming the systems have become big business, and the little guy ends up being a casualty in the overall war.
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#6Amazon wants to auto-hyphenate based on the current screen / font. Hardcoding hyphens in an ebook will look terrible in most cases. I don't see a problem with Amazon's stance.
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#7And this is why we used to deal with monopolies so harshly. Alas. I wonder when our country will start working in the citizens' favour?
When they force authors to publish in non-DRM encumbered formats that all readers can read like ePub or Mobipocket?
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#8My guess is that the majority of complaints Amazon gets about hyphenation in ebooks are due to poorly converted ebooks, where line-breaking hyphens from a print-formatted source file have accidentally made their way into the ebook. Amazon support is generally not set up spend more than 5 seconds looking at your email, so I surmise that they've filed it into the "yeah fix your ebook hyphens" category and are not readi…
Yet somehow they didn't pull A Dance With Dragons, which had appalling hyphenation in the original release.
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#9Amazon wants to auto-hyphenate based on the current screen / font. Hardcoding hyphens in an ebook will look terrible in most cases. I don't see a problem with Amazon's stance.
I don't think that's what the author is talking about. They mean hyphenated words such as 'wind-up'. The current screen or font doesn't make a difference for whether or not that's hyphenated. You're thinking of hyphenation for splitting a word over a line.
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#10Amazon is probably trying to correct publishers who copy+paste their hardcopy texts (from InDesign or wherever) into eBook format, taking with them artifacts from the print designer, like forced hyphenation. These artifacts from the print world are not useful in eBooks, since the reader is automatically breaking up lines based on the screen size, font, etc.
http://indesignsecrets.com/field-guide-to-indesign-hyphens.p...
I presume that this is what happened because a) she has a paperback & eBook edition of this book, b) this happens a lot, and c) someone complained. I would hope that Amazon would do a search in the eBook and not only look at the total hyphens, but also find a few examples of words that were probably broken up for print layout reasons. If so the author should remove the hyphens and resubmit the eBook.
If that's not the case, it's very silly. Obviously hyphens are useful and shouldn't be banned.