141–150 of 186 posts
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Here's the thing though - the writer should have the artistic liberty to use the punctuation they desire.
re: "red-head scarf", I'm skeptical that the artistic intention was that it was a scarf for redheads being repurposed for white hair. Though I have not read the story so that might be part of the plot for all I know.
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…
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You're blaming them for giving different treatment to an author who's at least a million times more important to their business?
I would expect more scrutiny of blatant formatting mistakes in a high profile release.
It's a poor QC process, not a stylistic or editorial review.
I am a developer, (not a writer), but this outrages me nonetheless
Amazon 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…
Check the comments after the post. That's mentioned as a possible reason and the author says that's not the case. Apparently Amazon is complaining about real hyphenated words, not line-break hyphen-ated words. [edit: It appears, though, that the author is stylistically abusing hyphens, so while they may not be wrong, they're grating to most readers. So, should Amazon be in the business of banning books on the grounds…
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> My point was that 3 of 4 uses of hyphens were wrong. Wrong according to whom? We're not talking about writers for a newspaper or magazine, where everyone is expected to adhere to a single style for the sake of uniformity. James Joyce did a number of things "wrong" both grammatically and stylistically, but that was part of the artistic expression. It's weird, to say the least, for a bookstore to enforce style. When…
"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.
And how did Amazon decided on which was the reason for his actions?
Amazon 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…
Check the comments after the post. That's mentioned as a possible reason and the author says that's not the case. Apparently Amazon is complaining about real hyphenated words, not line-break hyphen-ated words. [edit: It appears, though, that the author is stylistically abusing hyphens, so while they may not be wrong, they're grating to most readers. So, should Amazon be in the business of banning books on the grounds…
I realize this is a completely different situation than Graeme's, where he is deliberately hyphenating words in an anachronistic way, presumably for stylistic reasons. But I wonder if Amazon do have some sort of stance on hyphenation based on reader data.
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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…
Legitimate query: anyone know if the author receives those reader-reported issues directly?