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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

#171

Post by geoelectric »

pjbrunet wrote: post #169
geoelectric wrote: post #156

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.

My harsh response notwithstanding, I'm all for experimentation in literature.

I'm just not at all sure this is a technical glitch. As far as I can tell from the excerpts mentioned, the author probably does actually misuse hyphens. I'm not very prescriptive when it comes to language, but there is a point where you have to consider it to be an error instead of a mutation.

Edit:

OK, the book is back up and it's on Kindle Unlimited so I grabbed it and skimmed the first few chapters. So far, not too bad on the hyphen front, just a couple of instances I caught (water-bed jumped out). It might get worse later, of course.

But unless it's messing with screen-readers as posited above, perhaps Amazon did blindly react on this one. I've certainly seen much worse.

That said, holy crap the writing is profane. I don't think I've seen this many fucks in one place since I stopped watching C-SPAN.

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

#172

Post by MBCook »

mng2 wrote: post #163
MBCook wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I've heard of books being taken down (such as in this case) and even refunds being issued, but I wonder if it really matters.

When I asked about the feature on /r/kindle they said it had been around since the Paperwhite or so, yet books are still riddled with things that even a basic spell check would catch.

Amazon doesn't seem to be holding publisher's feet to the fire.

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

#173

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

Pxtl wrote: post #61
ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Motorhome is not hyphenated.

I blame spellcheck. In many cases the most legible solution is a German-style mashingwordstogether, but spellcheck systems highlight those so people hyphenate instead. For example, spellcheck has a curly red underline right now. But would it really look better as spell-check?

Spell check, no hyphen. Easiest way to figure out what needs a hyphen IMO is to google it. Otherwise, just try to avoid hyphenated words, a simpler word will often do.

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

#175

Post by adam-f »

qznc wrote: post #165
mhandley wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Beginner's mistake. "Beginners mistake" can only be used as the start of a sentence as in "Beginners mistake azure for blue."

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

#176

Post by sparky_z »

adam-f wrote: post #175
qznc wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Beginner's mistake. "Beginners mistake" can only be used as the start of a sentence as in "Beginners mistake azure for blue."

Some beginners mistake "Beginners mistake" as a phrase that can only be used at the start of a sentence. :)

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

#177

Post by somesay »

Hilarious if you see how Amazon still doesn't care about hyphenation on their Kindle platforms. It's an easy job, e.g. the algorithm used by LaTeX is free to use and with Amazon's size they might even build a good database to handle all exceptions. If you consider that this all could be precompiled, it doesn't even matter that a first-gen Kindle has a lousy CPU.

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

#178

Post by Houshalter »

qznc wrote: post #165
mhandley wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are being downvoted but apparently that is what /r/books is claiming the reason is: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/2pcnv2/amazon_remove...

I guess it causes issues with bad screen readers.

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

#179

Post by [deleted] »

ZoFreX wrote: post #155
Turing_Machine wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Wrong according to whom?" According to the customer who complained about them (who is, after all, the person with the money), and anyone else who's familiar with standard English usage. Consciously choosing to break the rules and breaking them because you don't know any better are two different things.

> According to the customer who complained about them (who is, after all, the person with the money) There is a time honoured tradition regarding what to do if you have money and don't like the artistic style of the author, and "demand their publisher pulls the book or forces the author to change their style to suit you" isn't it. (Not to mention all the happy customers who gave the book 4 & 5 star ratings and didn't…

[deleted]

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

#180

Post by Lisa72 »

ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #55
zelos wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say most of that usage is unnecessary clutter. Hyphens are intended to disambiguate grouping of word pairs. I haven't heard of anything called a "dog hind" that could have a leg. "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." That's incorrect, isn't it? It's reinforcing the potential confusion that the hyphen is meant to avoid. Unless she really was wearing a red scarf made from someone's head?

Yeah, all of those are pretty bad. I would have complained too if I had read this book.

There are one or two errors in usage, which are down to the editor not the writer, but the majority of them are correct (if not always necessary) in British English. His argument was based on the fact that Amazon told him to remove all of them rather than giving the book another proofread and removing the incorrect ones.
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