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Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

graemereynolds.wordpress.com

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Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#161
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be easily rectified if they looked up the words on each side of the hyphen. If they are actual words, then that hyphen should not count. If they are just partial words, then they should. But removing a book from circulation based on an obviously shoddy algorithm should never happen. As a Kindle author myself, I'm having second thoughts about the platform. Censorship by robots isn't exactly an attractive fe…

> If they are actual words, then that hyphen should not count. That would have side-effects e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-barrelled_name

[deleted]

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#162

So, I looked through the preview of the author's "High Moor" which is available on Amazon.co.uk and I see things like: "One of them picked up what looked like a dog's hind-leg and put it in a white plastic bag." "With the two-week Easter holiday just over a month away, ..." "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." "The door of one of the expensive motor-homes opened ..." Seems to me Amazon may hav…

Good point, I've caught a few other things that grind my gears. "Are there people out there so fucking mind-bogglingly stupid that the inclusion of a – between two words confuses them enough to be torn from the story and ruin the reading experience so much that they felt obliged to write to Amazon and complain?" I think that the author insulting someone who have paid for his book is not something intelligent, nice or…

One of the things I like about the Kindle is the option when reading to highlight a block of text and flag it as an error, which I've previously used for obvious typos, and the occasional badly placed hyphen. Having seen this and the implication that it can result in automated removal of a book from the Kindle store I think I'm going to stop that now.

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#163
post #26
post #4

When 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.

As someone who has been using a Kindle for almost all my book reading in the last few years, the major publishers don't care. Doesn't matter what I read it tends to have quite a few OCR errors and other mistakes that clearly exist for the print edition (extra hyphens) or 'correcting' things that used to be hyphenated (by removing the hyphen that needs to be there). My new Kindle has the ability to let me report typos…

I've been using the highlighting feature on errors in order to appease my OCD. The fact that Amazon has added error reporting seems like a hopeful sign and an admission that there is a widespread problem. The question is, are they actually going to make the fixes?

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#164
post #51

The big issue here are not the hyphens, other than maintaining formatting for different devices the publisher should not mess with the content after an author approved edit. Traditionally there was the copy editing process done by the publisher, but automating this on a the-customer-is-always-right process would probably have left a lot of hard to digest classics no where to be found. And seriously? Running a work of…

All of your examples relate to the knowing use of, let's say, "flavorful" language. The author's "flavor" appears to be "hyphen-happy" - do you believe his intent was to style his writing that way for dramatic or artistic effect?

A traditional publisher would have most likely turned any random author down in the first place as it was the norm throughout the history of publishing with high initial costs and a few publishing houses functioning as gatekeepers.

Then there were the so called (vanity) self-publishing houses who more or less capitalized on the rejects, while asking for a quite significant amount of money first to print and rudimentary, if at all, edit whatever the author offered. Here the gatekeepeíng factor to the public was how much money you had to spare to get your books printed and listed.

Nowadays with digital publishing the initial production costs are so low, that suddenly copy editing and proofreading by a person other than the author becomes a significant part of the costs, which it wasn't before, since that cost was dwarfed by the actual printing costs and was normally considered a given.

With no money to spare for third-party editors/proofreaders/layout this job is outsourced to algorithms and mechanical Turks with questionable results.

I suggest the best way to improve quality and acceptance of self-published work, is to actually pay a professional third-party person to proofread and copy edit your book first in a joint effort with the author. Only after that you should submit your work to a digital publisher. If amazon then still rejects this, based on customer complaints than we have an actual problem at hand which is not just the absence of any kind of human copy editing.

---

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. — Mark Twain

https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=editor&search_type=quotes

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#165

So, I looked through the preview of the author's "High Moor" which is available on Amazon.co.uk and I see things like: "One of them picked up what looked like a dog's hind-leg and put it in a white plastic bag." "With the two-week Easter holiday just over a month away, ..." "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." "The door of one of the expensive motor-homes opened ..." Seems to me Amazon may hav…

The preview of Moonstruck (the book in question) is also available through Amazon. Here are the first few hypens I can see: "There could be no-one there, ..." "...into a razor-filled muzzle ..." "... sleep, muscular, brown-furred monster." "... through her blood-soaked fur." "... propelled backwards in mid-leap, ..." "... the red-haired woman ..." "... a tall, grey-haired man ..." "mid-thirties" "mother-in-law" Not m…

Beginners mistake. These are minus (-) not hyphen (‐) characters.

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The writer is no James Joyce.

That's a really poor response. When Joyce published his first novel as a nobody, people like you would've said something equally thoughtless about his grammar, followed up by a glib "the writer is no Arthur Conan Doyle."

James Joyce followed proper English when he published his first novel as a nobody. (And his second novel, and third.) He was also a professor of English at the time, so he wasn't really "a nobody" even then. So he may not be the best test case.

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#167
The bigger issue is Amazon's inability to recognize the situation when the author followed up. In their defense, they probably have hundreds of thousands of self-publishing authors. And with most of them earning very little, Amazon may not even generate enough revenue from them to support a full-time staff even just to follow-up on every author's question.

It's unfortunate, because authors do deserve better, and they'll understandably be upset when they're routed to a malfunctioning robot. But if the problem is too many authors and not enough support staff, maybe the real question is: does self-publishing scale?

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#168
Actually, a few years ago someone wrote a script that pasted random YouTube comments together and submitted them to Amazon's Kindle Store as an actual ebook. Amazon published them all -- including their randomly-generated titles (like "A Lot Was Been Hard") -- until the books began receiving lots of media attention. Only then did Amazon remove them, citing the possibility of an unpleasant reading experience.

http://www.beyond-black-friday.com/2012/06/27/the-legend-of-...

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#169

Seems like most people in the thread are missing that this started with at least one actual reader complaint, and automation was only run over the book to verify. The author of the blog says there are only one complaint, but given the rather craptastic grammar examples posted and the vitriolic stance of the author, I'm not so sure. Also worth noting that the "automation" was a spell checker, which presumably flagged…

Hypothetically, let's say this writer is really talented. Few writers use hyphens for maximum effect. So few readers get to experience the hyphen-joy. When they do finally encounter it, they might be confused or annoyed. To some of us, that's sad, and aggravating. The technical glitch, at least at first glance, feels like the symptom of a larger lapse in longing for literacy and appreciation for poetry.

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#170
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have edited my comment to make it clearer that you weren't replying to anything I actually said. Hope that helps.

I was replying to what you said. His hyperbole regarding unintelligent customers was the behavior that was called out as not nice, professional or intelligent. His piss-poor use of hyphens (see what I did there?), however, isn't hyperbole. Hyperbole is a rhetorical device (and the greatest thing ever!), and unless he intended to evoke an emotional response in his readers by their incorrect and non-poetic application,…

It's strange that you educate us on what hyperbole and rhetorical devices are, yet can't recognise both those things in a sentence which begins "Are there people out there...?". The author is saying the direct opposite; that people aren't that stupid.
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