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Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
- mxfh 12y agoThe 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 literature against a dictionary for other reasons than supervised spell-checking? Literature is about expressiveness not about serfdom to grammar or spelling. What about Neologisms? There would be no nerds without inventive authors like Seuss. http://flavorwire.com/291507/everyday-words-that-were-invented-by-famous-authors/2 http://flavorwire.com/291507/everyday-words-that-were-invent... --- There surely still is a need for copy editing, proper formatting and layout, which was almost never done by the author alone, and also requires a different skill set than that of a typical author. These are the services a publisher should offer, but doing this without involving the author for final approval is just false. --- see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solecism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solecism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism also Cacography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catachresis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catachresis
- spdustin 12y agoAll 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?
- mxfh 12y agoA 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 https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=editor&search_type=quotes
- jeeva 12y agoThe quote reminds me of the 'hairy arm' idea, which I quite enjoy. A quick Google gave me this: http://www.1099.com/c/co/in/insanity006.html http://www.1099.com/c/co/in/insanity006.html
- kefka 12y agoAnd this is why we used to deal with monopolies so harshly. Alas. I wonder when our country will start working in the citizens' favour?
- matwood 12y agoHuh? 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.
- herge 12y agoWhen they force authors to publish in non-DRM encumbered formats that all readers can read like ePub or Mobipocket?
- Turing_Machine 12y agoAmazon doesn't "force" DRM on anybody. It's a checkbox in the publishing portal.
- _delirium 12y agoMy 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.
- moomin 12y agoYet somehow they didn't pull A Dance With Dragons, which had appalling hyphenation in the original release.
- Luc 12y agoYou're blaming them for giving different treatment to an author who's at least a million times more important to their business?
- cantankerous 12y agoYes. That's probably why he's beating up on Amazon....because they're picking on the little guys while ignoring the big ones.
- Luc 12y agoNice combattive metaphors, but this is just too silly to engage with. EDIT: Downvotes, but I'm sorry, I don't WANT to explain how it makes sense to expend more time and money on customers and suppliers that are a _million_ times more valuable to one's business.
- Dylan16807 12y agoI would expect more scrutiny of blatant formatting mistakes in a high profile release.
- michaelt 12y agoWhen 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.
- MBCook 12y agoAs 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 and other content errors. I've been using that feature A LOT. I've reported 13 content errors in the last month, and I'm not reading all that much, just a few hundred pages in that time.
- zelos 12y agoAgreed. It's worse for technical books in my experience. The last few I've bought have had unreadable code samples and screwed up or just plain missing contents pages. It's got to the point where I'm going back to buying paper textbooks.
- spdustin 12y agoLegitimate query: anyone know if the author receives those reader-reported issues directly?
- rnovak 12y agoFrom reading the original article here, it seems they receive a notice of the reports, not the actual reports, which I would assume Amazon does to protect readers from retaliation (?), and after Amazon has reviewed the report and checked for themselves. At least that was the feeling I got from the original article.
- mng2 12y agoI'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?
- mperham 12y agoAmazon 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.
- chrisseaton 12y agoI 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.
- mattmanser 12y agoThe whole thing's clearly a confusion, with the author being a nonce as he doesn't realize it's to do with line break hyphenates and Amazon customer service being nonces because they don't realize those hyphens aren't line break artefacts and they're just cut/pasting a standard response.
- jeremyswank 12y agoi didn't think a human being could be a 'nonce', or is this some new usage i don't know about?
- grokys 12y agoFrom wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce_%28slang%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce_%28slang%29 >> In the United Kingdom, nonce is a slang word for a sex offender or child sexual abuser.
- mattmanser 12y agoNonce means mild idiot in my social circles. I wasn't implying they were a social offender. I wasn't even aware of its implications. Learn something every day. I'd delete the comment but HN has got ridiculously militant about that now and I can't.
- furyg3 12y agoAmazon 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.php 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.
- tgb 12y agoThanks for making that point, this makes a lot more sense now. I really hope this is the case. (Though the author does state in a comment that they don't have any of those errors in their text.)
- joesmo 12y agoThis 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 feature.
- Someone1234 12y ago> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-barrelled_name
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- raverbashing 12y ago"and included a handy link to the Oxford English Dictionaries definition page which described it’s usage" AHEM
- InclinedPlane 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
- pfortuny 12y agoTheirs always someone nitpicking...
- simi_ 12y ago> Theirs always someone nitpicking... https://i.imgur.com/L2Rhc.png https://i.imgur.com/L2Rhc.png Based on my limited experience, people who think grammar Nazis are annoying shouldn't be suspected of being too intelligent.
- lclarkmichalek 12y agoThey derail the conversation. Of course they're annoying..
- simi_ 12y agoI will never mind a "Hey, you misspelled «X»". I can agree "Ha, he misspelled «Y», he's such a complete moron" is annoying/disruptive, but I don't think the answer to assholes is to stop caring about basic grammar rules. Incidentally, as an outsider I've never seen people being as careless/clueless with their language as British/American people are. A result of the education system or society, maybe.
- maemilius 12y agoI think it's mostly the number of common homophones and the speed at which most English speakers think and type that causes the problem. Add that to obscure language rules and you can end up with something that looks completely wrong, but isn't. A great example is "red-head scarf"; what you read is "(read head) scarf" what it means is "red (head scarf)". Granted, it makes the wording unnecessarily complicated, but it's probably grammatically correct.
- userbinator 12y agoWe have suppressed the book because of the combined impact to customers Reading this line, you would think the book is of a sufficiently extreme nature to trigger censoring, but seeing it applied to something as trivial as hyphenation (would that be hyphen-hate-tion...?) is the most shocking part.
- scrrr 12y agoOff topic, but has it occurred to anyone that the overuse of the term 'war on x' might impair what the word 'war' really stands for?
- jessaustin 12y agoThat ship done sailed. Like, in the 1960s. No worries, though, because if any concept deserves impairing and besmirching, surely war does?
- otherusername 12y ago"Early examples of war as metaphor in US political discourse include J. Edgar Hoover's "war on crime" in the 1930s". We've been using it as a metaphor since 1930's. It hasn't impaired the "real" usage of the word "War" so far. I doubt it will in the future.
- pluma 12y agoTo be fair, the US has always been at war with Eastasia.
- danbruc 12y agoGeorge Carlin more than 20 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilipDBclxRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilipDBclxRc
- JetSpiegel 12y agoEdwin Starr too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQHUAJTZqF0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQHUAJTZqF0
- ctdonath 12y agoWell, not long after the term started (Hoover), the US Congress ceased to "declare war" when proceeding to engage in what obviously is war. Now it's just "kinetic military action" or some such, never a statement of "the USA hereby declares war on ______ ...".
- DanBC 12y agoWhen you have "grammar matters" in big fucking letters at the top of a blog you really need to proof read. > So, chuckling to myself, I sent back a response pointing out that the use of a hyphen to join two words together was perfectly valid in the English language and included a handy link to the Oxford English Dictionaries definition page which described it’s usage. POSSESSIVE ITS HAS NO APOSTROPHE. Normally I really don't care -- apostrophe use is confusing; my grammar is lousy; I tend to be descriptivist not prescriptivist, etc. The writer doesn't mention if these hyphens are all joining two words, or of some of them are used to split a single word across a linebreak. The arguments are different for each. For the former you point to the satisfied reviews and a bunch of style guides about use of hyphens. For the latter you mention the piss-poor typography on Kindle, and the lack of any control for authors or readers. (The setting to left-justify with ragged right margin is a hidden setting that requires a tweak to access).
- pothibo 12y agoLet me shame you every time you introduce a bug/typo in your code.
- DanBC 12y agoPlease do. Especially if I have "grammar matters" in big letters in those code headers and the code is about grammar.
- pothibo 12y agoCompletely missing the point, Mr. Know-it-all.
- DanBC 12y agoWeird that you call me Mr Know it all when i have already said that my grammar is terrible. You're missing the point - when a person is complaining about other people's misuse of grammar, and does so on a webpage that has "grammar matters" in big letters at the top, they really need to make sure that their grammar is not blatantly incorrect. Obvious errors discredit the point they're trying to make. See also Skitt's law. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6408927/Internet-rules-and-laws-the-top-10-from-Godwin-to-Poe.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6408927/Internet-...
- rdl 12y agoCalling someone's employee a "random fuck-wit" is probably not a successful strategy to get expedited successful results from your customer. Amazon goes above and beyond for their customers. As a publisher or marketplace seller operating on their platform, they are your customer. Amazon's reseller support is entirely different, in my experience, from how they treat consumers -- a bit less polish because it is an internal tool is to be expected, but it goes a bit beyond that. I was initially a little unhappy with that, but since I'm also a customer, it makes sense. They clearly could do better here in escalation path, but don't expect hand-holding. Amazon isn't exactly going to go out of business because your book isn't for sale.
- cantankerous 12y agoAmazon is acting as the marketplace, or the conduit between producers and consumers here. In this formulation, both ends of the pipe are their customers. Yes you can make a reasonable case for quality control, but not a big one. Books are a pretty big caveat emptor when it comes to the prose contained. They always have been. If Amazon is so concerned about formatting, then it should make some better tools to help authors fix bad formatting, not just run what seems to be simplistic regex matches on a pile of words.
- lnanek2 12y agoIt would be nice if the author would include a sample page of where the hyphens are used. We don't know if they are just used for word breaking across lines from a poor ebook or if they are used for joining words. I went to amazon to try to check, but it says item under review, so its not like we can see the real situation.
- anon4 12y agoUse en dash instead of normal dash and hope amazon's bots don't notice. If that fails, replace - with ·. Include preface "due to limitations of Amazon's ebook technology, this book uses the · symbol in place of - for hyphenating words".
- jgrahamc 12y agoSo, 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 have a point about some of his use of hyphens.
- zelos 12y agoI'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?
- heinrich5991 12y agoI don't know, in mathematics we say that we have a K-vector space when it really means K-(vector space).
- ulisesrmzroche 12y agoYeah, all of those are pretty bad. I would have complained too if I had read this book.
- Buge 12y agoTwo-week is correct.
- ulisesrmzroche 12y agoAh, yeah, good point. I didn't read that one.
- Lisa72 12y ago
- ChicagoDave 12y agoMy experience with Amazon's "rules" are that they tend to be so heavily automated that their support staff couldn't change anything if they wanted to. So my suggestion to Mr. Reynolds is to strip the hyphens and move on. Amazon is a bit of a monopoly and your only other choice is to not use their services.
- agentargo 12y agotest
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- potench 12y agoI wonder if Amazon's automated system would flag something like "Riddley Walker" where, in the future, words have changed meaning and are spelled phonetically. (1) Maybe Amazon could have an editors community similar to Stackoverflow where they can influence and override the automated curating system. 1. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddley_Walker http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddley_Walker
- sireat 12y agoAmazon is rather hard-headed about their Kindle formatting. I suppose it stems from early issues with even well-known books being horribly mis-formatted for Kindle. Ok enough hyphens for now. At least you English writers can count your lucky stars that it is possible to publish ebooks at all on Amazon. If you have published a regular book on Amazon in a language not deemed to be worthy of Kindle support you are SOL: https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A9FDO0A3V0119 https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A9FDO0A3V0119 Rather a short list isn't it? And the list is not growing despite sideloaded books displaying perfectly fine on Kindle in the not supported languages.
- ghostington 12y agoInner City Hope USA - Educational & Patriotic Movement #TheBookerProject https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/inner-city-hope-usa/x/8161550 https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/inner-city-hope-usa/x/816...
- duwease 12y agoHas Amazon named this algorithm yet? I'd like to nominate "Proper English Diction And Nomenclature Tracker".
- whiddershins 12y agoI, personally, do not want Amazon to make quality determinations regarding grammar and style for books they sell. It offends me philosophically and it seems horrible just from a practical point of view. I do understand this could be reasonable if, as some commenters wrote, this is a result of trying to combat poorly implemented digitization. The rest of these comments discussing whether the original author is using hyphens correctly seem insane to me. Writers write as they write. Read it or don't read it. Enjoy it or hate it. Ask for a refund if you think it is sold in bad faith. But forcing a writer to change it is an unacceptable invasion of expression by the infrastructure. Any short term gain in increasing "quality" is subsumed by the potential weakening of the evolution of communication and art, which relies on creators taking liberties with conventional forms.
- mring33621 12y agoI read tons of books via the kindle app on android. I believe that hyphens DO hinder the reading experience... due to an apparent bug with the kindle app! I have seen countless times that, if the current page breaks on a hyphen, then the next page seems to begin at the next full sentence, thereby losing information. My normal workaround is to simply change font size temporarily to force a repagination. It is annoying. So, maybe this is why people have complained? I can't really see any other explanation for caring whether or not an author chose to hyphenate.
- lbrindze 12y agoHere is a wild idea... If you are going to be a publisher of books, why not qa (ie edit) these books the old fashion way. If quality books is the top priority, no algorithm will match the discernment of the human eye. I am a developer, (not a writer), but this outrages me nonetheless
- nathanb 12y agoInterestingly, the Kindle (at least, the Paperwhite I have) does not seem to hyphenate words, preferring instead to leave a ragged right edge if it's not able to justify within tolerances. 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.
- CanSpice 12y agoNext up: E. E. Cummings books removed for lack of readability.
- geoelectric 12y agoSeems 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 examples that aren't considered properly hyphenated in the English language. Amazon does most certainly pull books that have bad spelling or grammar based on user complaints, and I'm glad they do so. I've stumbled into poorly self-edited Kindle books many times, and have been awfully pissed I've dropped money on them. I'm happy for some quality control. For those that think there should be a completely hands-off release process for these books, that's just horseshit. Books have been edited pretty much since the concept of "books." If an author wants to apply back for a waiver based on their Joycean command of the English language, wonderful. For a pulp writer, I don't buy it for a second. I'm also waiting to hear about the rash of automated spell or grammar checking causing issues. Because right now what I see is one frustrated author throwing around accusations and any number of satisfied authors who actually wrote their books correctly.
- pjbrunet 12y agoHypothetically, 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.
- geoelectric 12y agoMy 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.
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- MilnerRoute 12y agoThe 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?
- MilnerRoute 12y agoActually, 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-the-worst-book-ever/ http://www.beyond-black-friday.com/2012/06/27/the-legend-of-...
- somesay 12y agoHilarious 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.