16 ms·

I don’t know if whoever flagged the typos in my eBook thought they were helping

144 points by danso 7y ago

phendrenad2 7y ago
Amazon is insanely effective at cutting costs and passing those savings on to you, the user. But sometimes that means they'll crowdsource typo-finding and you'll miss out on a good book because someone without a high enough reading comprehension level flagged it as "has quality issues". People are willing to lower their expectations infinitely as long as it means lower prices. So the solution is: consumers need to reevaluate what they're willing to accept/spend, the rest will follow.
- mlyle 7y ago
  The books I read are well-edited, but that doesn't mean that a glaring thing or two doesn't slip through. I've flagged things where errors in pronoun agreement has made things confusing, hoping that I'm making things better for the next reader. This should be an improvement on what we've lived with before. But it's not my intention to create a high priority work item for anyone...
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    Some things I've flagged recently: - A word that was in boldface, except for the last letter. - "downlike", which should have been "down like". - A gloss of Han Wudi as the "marshal emperor" (should be "martial emperor"). - "teapoy", which I thought was a typo for "teapot". It wasn't! I learned this a few pages later, when the text mentioned gathering several things into the teapoy. But you can't unreport a typo. Still, typo reporting is obviously a good idea, not a bad idea. The lesson is to develop workflows that accommodate it, not to stop flagging mistakes.
    - Baeocystin 7y ago
      >teapoy I've never knowingly come across that word before. Neat. I wonder what happened in the early 50's to make it so briefly popular?
      - DanBC 7y ago
        A bunch of British people left India after 1947 and brought a load of stuff back with them.
    - DanBC 7y ago
      > which I thought was a typo for "teapot". It wasn't! ...but isn't this the problem? People report things that they think are problems without taking the few moments to check the words. Teapoy is in all of my dictionaries.
      - stubish 7y ago
        The problem was there was no way to correct the mistake. Any system dealing with human input needs to accept that to err is human.
      - serf 7y ago
        >...but isn't this the problem? so what's the proposed solution? 100% accurate user submissions, lest we get rid of the entire system? these kind of systems are supposed to work through different tiers of people. The user reported submission is to be considered the least trustworthy, useful only for attracting the attention of someone who can make a responsible decision or correction. the problem is that Amazon acts without the middle-man supervising whether or not the user has made a valid discovery -- they rely on non-expert users, some of which may have a vendetta.
        thaumasiotes 7y ago
        The message you get after reporting an error is "Thank you. A customer support specialist will look into this." If that's even vaguely true, you don't need 100% accurate user submissions. (Which, as you note, you can't have anyway.) That's the whole idea of a QA layer.
        DanBC 7y ago
        If Amazon runs a service they should know that users are going to flood them with inaccurate reports, and so they shouldn't attach much if any weight to those reports.
        mlyle 7y ago
        Yah, that's pretty much what he said-- that there's value in the reports, but that they will be of varied quality. You're talking past him.
MBCook 7y ago
So what am I supposed to do when I buy an ebook and it’s full of typos or OCR errors? Just suck it up? “Oh well, next time I just shouldn’t buy from MAJOR PUBLISHER?” It’s sad it can be used to grief, but as a user it’s the only method I have of pointing out the issues and asking for them to be addressed.
- simion314 7y ago
  I think Amazon should add a threshold and always have a human check the reported issues before setting up this flags that can do damage to the author. But if you look at youtube example the big companies don't care about the little guys.
  - drivingmenuts 7y ago
    Thats basically the function of an editor. That’s not a function that lends itself well to automated, hands-off processes. So they’d have to back to charging some amount of money, which leads us back to square one. Big guy, little guy doesn’t matter in this case. An editor costs money and either Big Name Publisher can eat the cost or No Name Author, but it doesn’t benefit Amazon much to eat it.
    - simion314 7y ago
      Yes, but in this cases you have users or algorithms to find potential problems and a human will check should be more economic that having an editor reading the entire book or watching the full video. Related to youtube is weird they do not have a trust system for channels with a larger reputation have a human double check the algorithm , it would at least reduce the bad publicity when you accuse a channel with many subscribers of ridiculous things that were not in the video.
- stock_toaster 7y ago
  > It’s sad it can be used to grief, but as a user it’s -> a out <- the only method I have of pointing out the issues and asking for them to be addressed Ironic typo?
ianai 7y ago
What’s the synopsis? For those of us with all social networking blocked. Thanks.
- gtirloni 7y ago
  I can read it just fine without logging in or unblocking the website.
  - ianai 7y ago
    Twitter is 127.0.0.1 on my hosts.
    - milankragujevic 7y ago
      https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1209518819397505024.html?refreshed=yes https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1209518819397505024.html?...
      - ianai 7y ago
        Awesome, thank you!
    - gtirloni 7y ago
      It's your choice not to read anything there then. Not fair to ask other people to offer synopsis for you. You've opted out.
- danso 7y ago
  Apparently, a user flagged the word "moreso" as being a typo. According to the author, not only is this report erroneous (because "moreso" is actually a colloquial word), but it automatically resulted in the author's book being flagged on its sale page as having quality issues.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    I suspect that a report of one typo isn't enough to cause that. (And the tweet does say "whoever flagged the typos", not "whoever flagged one spurious typo".) "Moreso" is just the author reaching for the most sympathetic example they can find.
panarky 7y ago
Any system that can be gamed will be gamed.
mgraczyk 7y ago
Man it's a shame that this system is having undesired consequences for the author, but the whole thread just reeks of pretentious entitlement. Readers are giving feedback through an app that makes it easy for them to do so. Maybe the feedback is unhelpful, but I don't see anything here indicating that the readers are acting in bad faith. These authors should start from a position of gratefulness that their work is being published and read. From there it would be much easier to interpret this in a constructive way.
- amingilani 7y ago
  I concur. The user provides feedback through the obvious interface they see, and the author blames the user. If it had started from a place of empathy, maybe it'd have the desired effect, but it doesn't for me. Maybe the author could have blamed the system, or raised the issue with Amazon, but starting off blaming the user sounds silly.
  - mintplant 7y ago
    I'm not sure how the both of you can interpret the author's words the way you have. > Hey, I don’t know if whoever flagged the typos in my ebook thought they were helping, but please don’t do that. That just means there’s a quality warning on Amazon’s sale’s page. It’s super not helpful, particularly when the issue is vernacular English. > You have made my life way more difficult on Christmas Eve by setting this flag. I’m sure that wasn’t your intent, but...yeah, not great. > Again, my dear proofreader friends, please don’t blame yourselves. Amazon doesn’t exactly explain that your desire to be helpful is telling a computer that Book Is Bad, Pull Bad Book.
    - amingilani 7y ago
      I understand different people have different perspectives but, to me, it still reads condescending towards the reader. As if the author were saying something along the lines of: I know you're trying to help, but don't do that. You're not being helpful because you don't know well enough. You didn't know better but you've ruined Christmas for me. That said, it's not you, it's Amazon. There are also these: > THAT WASN'T EVEN A TYPO, PERSON, YOU GOT CONFUSED ABOUT THE SPEAKER > I will, sadly and angstfully, cop to typos. I make them. I’ve made peace. But now I’m supposed to fix failures of this person’s reading comprehension and understanding of vernacular so that Amazon will take down the tag saying my book is low quality. During a sale.
EamonnMR 7y ago
I was not even aware that this flag existed. I've seen a couple of truly bum books on Amazon[1][2], and I suppose that this is meant to catch them, but there ought to be some sort of middle ground where publishers can agree with amazon not to publish shovel-lit, and amazon will agree to give them the benefit of the doubt. [1][2] I was going to link to two such books, but they're 404 dogs now, so I suppose the system does work in some cases - I left reviews to the effect of "don't buy this, these books are fake/ultra low quality" and they have since been removed.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > but there ought to be some sort of middle ground where publishers can agree with amazon not to publish shovel-lit, and amazon will agree to give them the benefit of the doubt. Amazon is actively seeking to conmoditize publishing and therefore capture the share of profits (and gatekeeping power) previously captured by publishers, so the mechanism you suggest, while potentially viable as an interim measure, is ultimately contrary to their strategy.
- MBCook 7y ago
  Last I checked it was only available on the Kindle and not (for example) the phone app.
  - ObsoleteNerd 7y ago
    I’m a huge kindle reader (hours a day) and never noticed. I generally just highlight and make a note saying “typo” if it’s an entertaining or jarring one, as some of the authors I read ask for mistakes to be emailed in so they can correct it (and some even give you free copies of their books if you do so).
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    Flagging of content errors is definitely available in the phone app. I don't keep my Kindle connected to the internet, so I have to pull out the phone whenever I find one.
danschumann 7y ago
People who criticize such things are sometimes the stupidest form of smart people. English should be fluid.
- rasz 7y ago
  your absolutelly wright
- shkkmo 7y ago
  The is fluidity that add nuance and simplicity and there is fluidity that destroys meaning and versatility while adding complexity. The fact that "literally" now figuratively has the same meaning as "figuratively" only adds confusion and limits the expressiveness of the language.
  - danschumann 7y ago
    I think when people say "literally" to emphasize a point, that isn't fluid.. it disrupts the flow of the conversation because in my head I call them an idiot. People who claim spell checks because they can't understand turns of phrases are the problem.
nxrabl 7y ago
Ursula Vernon is the author of Digger [0], a graphic novel which won a Hugo in 2012. If anyone feels moved by this to support an independent artist, I can vouch for it as a great read. [0] http://diggercomic.com/ http://diggercomic.com/
gnicholas 7y ago
A friend who works in academia published a book with a major university press. The press had someone (in another country) do copy edits, and it came back with all of the historical language "corrected" to modern English. It's as if they ran it through a standard spell checker and just picked the closest replacement for every single word that came up. Since there was no redline provided, it took my friend hours to go back and fix all of their errors (there were other formatting changes that had to stay, otherwise they could have just reverted to the prior version).
- jimbo1qaz 7y ago
  > Since there was no redline provided, it took my friend hours to go back and fix all of their errors (there were other formatting changes that had to stay, otherwise they could have just reverted to the prior version). Was your friend able to use a program to diff (show all changes between) the two versions, and resolve them? Or was it done by hand?
  - gnicholas 7y ago
    All done by hand. This was the last round of edits before printing, so couldn’t risk missing any of the botched edits.
- Turing_Machine 7y ago
  I recall that J.R.R. Tolkien was highly unamused when an editorial assistant "corrected" some of his archaic language. It was along the lines of "Sure, I'm just Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford University, but what do I know about it?"
zorpner 7y ago
Charles Stross clarifies the situation: https://twitter.com/cstross/status/1209553772424253440 https://twitter.com/cstross/status/1209553772424253440 > What you’re doing if you flag a book as containing typos is, you tell a computer to yank the book off sale immediately. Nobody else can buy it until the author jumps through flaming hoops. Best of all? You might be misreading vernacular or British English or just plain wrong. To the folks concerned about how to give feedback -- pressure Amazon to allow a better way. The current situation is much more analogous to e.g. reviews for rideshare drivers. Giving less than a 5 is potentially depriving someone of their livelihood. Unless that is specifically what you want to do, don't.
H8crilA 7y ago
This should be solved like the "bad backlinks" problem in SEO - a disavow mechanism. The author should be able to simply reject edits/flags as he sees fit.
m463 7y ago
The root cause is amazon. The kindle store has been around 12 years. Amazon tracks what you read and when and other "book reads you" stuff you can't turn off. You can highlight passages in any book. Amazon will share this with the world via popular highlights. But, trivial as it sounds, you cannot highlight a typo or grammatical error. This would clean up the books, quietly and offline, but amazon doesn't do it. 12 years kindle has been around.
shadowgovt 7y ago
The downside to self-publishing is that since one lacks a trusted editor, one is at the mercy of systems intended to control for the lack of a trusted editor.
Tempest1981 7y ago
Which book was it? This one? Or is it still hidden? https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1534429565 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1534429565
- colomon 7y ago
  Since she mentions it is on sale, the answer is most likely Swordheart: https://www.amazon.com/Swordheart-T-Kingfisher-ebook/dp/B07KGDDW7J https://www.amazon.com/Swordheart-T-Kingfisher-ebook/dp/B07K...

144 points by danso 7y ago

Amazon is insanely effective at cutting costs and passing those savings on to you, the user. But sometimes that means they'll crowdsource typo-finding and you'll miss out on a good book because someone without a high enough reading comprehension level flagged it as "has quality issues". People are willing to lower their expectations infinitely as long as it means lower prices. So the solution is: consumers need to reevaluate what they're willing to accept/spend, the rest will follow.

mlyle 7y ago
The books I read are well-edited, but that doesn't mean that a glaring thing or two doesn't slip through. I've flagged things where errors in pronoun agreement has made things confusing, hoping that I'm making things better for the next reader. This should be an improvement on what we've lived with before. But it's not my intention to create a high priority work item for anyone...
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  Some things I've flagged recently: - A word that was in boldface, except for the last letter. - "downlike", which should have been "down like". - A gloss of Han Wudi as the "marshal emperor" (should be "martial emperor"). - "teapoy", which I thought was a typo for "teapot". It wasn't! I learned this a few pages later, when the text mentioned gathering several things into the teapoy. But you can't unreport a typo. Still, typo reporting is obviously a good idea, not a bad idea. The lesson is to develop workflows that accommodate it, not to stop flagging mistakes.
  - Baeocystin 7y ago
    >teapoy I've never knowingly come across that word before. Neat. I wonder what happened in the early 50's to make it so briefly popular?
    - DanBC 7y ago
      A bunch of British people left India after 1947 and brought a load of stuff back with them.
  - DanBC 7y ago
    > which I thought was a typo for "teapot". It wasn't! ...but isn't this the problem? People report things that they think are problems without taking the few moments to check the words. Teapoy is in all of my dictionaries.
    - stubish 7y ago
      The problem was there was no way to correct the mistake. Any system dealing with human input needs to accept that to err is human.
    - serf 7y ago
      >...but isn't this the problem? so what's the proposed solution? 100% accurate user submissions, lest we get rid of the entire system? these kind of systems are supposed to work through different tiers of people. The user reported submission is to be considered the least trustworthy, useful only for attracting the attention of someone who can make a responsible decision or correction. the problem is that Amazon acts without the middle-man supervising whether or not the user has made a valid discovery -- they rely on non-expert users, some of which may have a vendetta.
      - thaumasiotes 7y ago
        The message you get after reporting an error is "Thank you. A customer support specialist will look into this." If that's even vaguely true, you don't need 100% accurate user submissions. (Which, as you note, you can't have anyway.) That's the whole idea of a QA layer.
      - DanBC 7y ago
        If Amazon runs a service they should know that users are going to flood them with inaccurate reports, and so they shouldn't attach much if any weight to those reports.
        mlyle 7y ago
        Yah, that's pretty much what he said-- that there's value in the reports, but that they will be of varied quality. You're talking past him.

MBCook 7y ago

So what am I supposed to do when I buy an ebook and it’s full of typos or OCR errors? Just suck it up? “Oh well, next time I just shouldn’t buy from MAJOR PUBLISHER?” It’s sad it can be used to grief, but as a user it’s the only method I have of pointing out the issues and asking for them to be addressed.

simion314 7y ago
I think Amazon should add a threshold and always have a human check the reported issues before setting up this flags that can do damage to the author. But if you look at youtube example the big companies don't care about the little guys.
- drivingmenuts 7y ago
  Thats basically the function of an editor. That’s not a function that lends itself well to automated, hands-off processes. So they’d have to back to charging some amount of money, which leads us back to square one. Big guy, little guy doesn’t matter in this case. An editor costs money and either Big Name Publisher can eat the cost or No Name Author, but it doesn’t benefit Amazon much to eat it.
  - simion314 7y ago
    Yes, but in this cases you have users or algorithms to find potential problems and a human will check should be more economic that having an editor reading the entire book or watching the full video. Related to youtube is weird they do not have a trust system for channels with a larger reputation have a human double check the algorithm , it would at least reduce the bad publicity when you accuse a channel with many subscribers of ridiculous things that were not in the video.
stock_toaster 7y ago
> It’s sad it can be used to grief, but as a user it’s -> a out <- the only method I have of pointing out the issues and asking for them to be addressed Ironic typo?

ianai 7y ago

What’s the synopsis? For those of us with all social networking blocked. Thanks.

gtirloni 7y ago
I can read it just fine without logging in or unblocking the website.
- ianai 7y ago
  Twitter is 127.0.0.1 on my hosts.
  - milankragujevic 7y ago
    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1209518819397505024.html?refreshed=yes https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1209518819397505024.html?...
    - ianai 7y ago
      Awesome, thank you!
  - gtirloni 7y ago
    It's your choice not to read anything there then. Not fair to ask other people to offer synopsis for you. You've opted out.
danso 7y ago
Apparently, a user flagged the word "moreso" as being a typo. According to the author, not only is this report erroneous (because "moreso" is actually a colloquial word), but it automatically resulted in the author's book being flagged on its sale page as having quality issues.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  I suspect that a report of one typo isn't enough to cause that. (And the tweet does say "whoever flagged the typos", not "whoever flagged one spurious typo".) "Moreso" is just the author reaching for the most sympathetic example they can find.

panarky 7y ago

Any system that can be gamed will be gamed.

mgraczyk 7y ago

Man it's a shame that this system is having undesired consequences for the author, but the whole thread just reeks of pretentious entitlement. Readers are giving feedback through an app that makes it easy for them to do so. Maybe the feedback is unhelpful, but I don't see anything here indicating that the readers are acting in bad faith. These authors should start from a position of gratefulness that their work is being published and read. From there it would be much easier to interpret this in a constructive way.

amingilani 7y ago
I concur. The user provides feedback through the obvious interface they see, and the author blames the user. If it had started from a place of empathy, maybe it'd have the desired effect, but it doesn't for me. Maybe the author could have blamed the system, or raised the issue with Amazon, but starting off blaming the user sounds silly.
- mintplant 7y ago
  I'm not sure how the both of you can interpret the author's words the way you have. > Hey, I don’t know if whoever flagged the typos in my ebook thought they were helping, but please don’t do that. That just means there’s a quality warning on Amazon’s sale’s page. It’s super not helpful, particularly when the issue is vernacular English. > You have made my life way more difficult on Christmas Eve by setting this flag. I’m sure that wasn’t your intent, but...yeah, not great. > Again, my dear proofreader friends, please don’t blame yourselves. Amazon doesn’t exactly explain that your desire to be helpful is telling a computer that Book Is Bad, Pull Bad Book.
  - amingilani 7y ago
    I understand different people have different perspectives but, to me, it still reads condescending towards the reader. As if the author were saying something along the lines of: I know you're trying to help, but don't do that. You're not being helpful because you don't know well enough. You didn't know better but you've ruined Christmas for me. That said, it's not you, it's Amazon. There are also these: > THAT WASN'T EVEN A TYPO, PERSON, YOU GOT CONFUSED ABOUT THE SPEAKER > I will, sadly and angstfully, cop to typos. I make them. I’ve made peace. But now I’m supposed to fix failures of this person’s reading comprehension and understanding of vernacular so that Amazon will take down the tag saying my book is low quality. During a sale.

EamonnMR 7y ago

I was not even aware that this flag existed. I've seen a couple of truly bum books on Amazon[1][2], and I suppose that this is meant to catch them, but there ought to be some sort of middle ground where publishers can agree with amazon not to publish shovel-lit, and amazon will agree to give them the benefit of the doubt. [1][2] I was going to link to two such books, but they're 404 dogs now, so I suppose the system does work in some cases - I left reviews to the effect of "don't buy this, these books are fake/ultra low quality" and they have since been removed.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> but there ought to be some sort of middle ground where publishers can agree with amazon not to publish shovel-lit, and amazon will agree to give them the benefit of the doubt. Amazon is actively seeking to conmoditize publishing and therefore capture the share of profits (and gatekeeping power) previously captured by publishers, so the mechanism you suggest, while potentially viable as an interim measure, is ultimately contrary to their strategy.
MBCook 7y ago
Last I checked it was only available on the Kindle and not (for example) the phone app.
- ObsoleteNerd 7y ago
  I’m a huge kindle reader (hours a day) and never noticed. I generally just highlight and make a note saying “typo” if it’s an entertaining or jarring one, as some of the authors I read ask for mistakes to be emailed in so they can correct it (and some even give you free copies of their books if you do so).
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  Flagging of content errors is definitely available in the phone app. I don't keep my Kindle connected to the internet, so I have to pull out the phone whenever I find one.

danschumann 7y ago

People who criticize such things are sometimes the stupidest form of smart people. English should be fluid.

rasz 7y ago
your absolutelly wright
shkkmo 7y ago
The is fluidity that add nuance and simplicity and there is fluidity that destroys meaning and versatility while adding complexity. The fact that "literally" now figuratively has the same meaning as "figuratively" only adds confusion and limits the expressiveness of the language.
- danschumann 7y ago
  I think when people say "literally" to emphasize a point, that isn't fluid.. it disrupts the flow of the conversation because in my head I call them an idiot. People who claim spell checks because they can't understand turns of phrases are the problem.

nxrabl 7y ago

Ursula Vernon is the author of Digger [0], a graphic novel which won a Hugo in 2012. If anyone feels moved by this to support an independent artist, I can vouch for it as a great read. [0] http://diggercomic.com/ http://diggercomic.com/

gnicholas 7y ago

A friend who works in academia published a book with a major university press. The press had someone (in another country) do copy edits, and it came back with all of the historical language "corrected" to modern English. It's as if they ran it through a standard spell checker and just picked the closest replacement for every single word that came up. Since there was no redline provided, it took my friend hours to go back and fix all of their errors (there were other formatting changes that had to stay, otherwise they could have just reverted to the prior version).

jimbo1qaz 7y ago
> Since there was no redline provided, it took my friend hours to go back and fix all of their errors (there were other formatting changes that had to stay, otherwise they could have just reverted to the prior version). Was your friend able to use a program to diff (show all changes between) the two versions, and resolve them? Or was it done by hand?
- gnicholas 7y ago
  All done by hand. This was the last round of edits before printing, so couldn’t risk missing any of the botched edits.
Turing_Machine 7y ago
I recall that J.R.R. Tolkien was highly unamused when an editorial assistant "corrected" some of his archaic language. It was along the lines of "Sure, I'm just Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford University, but what do I know about it?"

zorpner 7y ago

Charles Stross clarifies the situation: https://twitter.com/cstross/status/1209553772424253440 https://twitter.com/cstross/status/1209553772424253440 > What you’re doing if you flag a book as containing typos is, you tell a computer to yank the book off sale immediately. Nobody else can buy it until the author jumps through flaming hoops. Best of all? You might be misreading vernacular or British English or just plain wrong. To the folks concerned about how to give feedback -- pressure Amazon to allow a better way. The current situation is much more analogous to e.g. reviews for rideshare drivers. Giving less than a 5 is potentially depriving someone of their livelihood. Unless that is specifically what you want to do, don't.

H8crilA 7y ago

This should be solved like the "bad backlinks" problem in SEO - a disavow mechanism. The author should be able to simply reject edits/flags as he sees fit.

m463 7y ago

The root cause is amazon. The kindle store has been around 12 years. Amazon tracks what you read and when and other "book reads you" stuff you can't turn off. You can highlight passages in any book. Amazon will share this with the world via popular highlights. But, trivial as it sounds, you cannot highlight a typo or grammatical error. This would clean up the books, quietly and offline, but amazon doesn't do it. 12 years kindle has been around.

shadowgovt 7y ago

The downside to self-publishing is that since one lacks a trusted editor, one is at the mercy of systems intended to control for the lack of a trusted editor.

Tempest1981 7y ago

Which book was it? This one? Or is it still hidden? https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1534429565 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1534429565

colomon 7y ago
Since she mentions it is on sale, the answer is most likely Swordheart: https://www.amazon.com/Swordheart-T-Kingfisher-ebook/dp/B07KGDDW7J https://www.amazon.com/Swordheart-T-Kingfisher-ebook/dp/B07K...