
I don’t know if whoever flagged the typos in my eBook thought they were helping - danso
https://twitter.com/ursulav/status/1209518819397505024
======
MBCook
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.

~~~
Baeocystin
If someone genuinely spent the time to help catch errors in my manuscripts,
I'd be thrilled. Editors are expensive!

That the automated system as described can be abused is a real problem, and
that needs to be addressed. But that is a separate issue from the generally
bad state of what passes for final edits in many books nowadays. That the
author in question can't be bothered to keep a current copy of their
manuscript leaves me lukewarm on the issue.

~~~
mintplant
She could be traveling for the holidays and away from her usual setup. Someone
in the replies mentions having this happen to them while in rural Newfoundland
for a funeral, equipped with only a cellphone and a spotty connection.

Either way, I bet many programmers would run into trouble if asked to drop
everything and immediately spin back up a production-ready environment for a
project they haven't touched in a year.

~~~
Baeocystin
A full book manuscript is tiny, and requires zero spinup whatsoever, unless
you count opening a PDF or DOCX file as such. I have a copy of everything I've
written over the past thirty years available immediately, and it would fit on
a $4 thumb drive. If my career depended on it, I would be quite certain to
have it with me at all times.

~~~
shakna
> A full book manuscript is tiny, and requires zero spinup whatsoever, unless
> you count opening a PDF or DOCX file as such.

That is not uncommon, but neither is it the quantitative norm. A lot of
authors are particular about the typesetting of their documents, and it does
require a rendering environment.

It isn't unusual for a half-LaTeX half-something-else monstrosity to be
rendered in a semi-custom environment. Especially if you're dealing with
anything academic.

In those kinds of environments you may have a ton of assets, like graphs, that
may either be large file-sizes, and/or re-generated during the rendering
process from various large datasets. Those assets are not small, and may
prevent you holding much more than a couple books on your $4 thumb drive.

~~~
Baeocystin
If you have to use an academic, LaTeX monstrosity as an example to even
somewhat limit the number of books you can store for a few dollars, surely we
can just agree that the cost of storage is inconsequential compared to what an
author will produce over their career output?

~~~
shakna
Perhaps. But months and years down the line, recreating an environment to
regenerate the book can take considerable effort.

------
mgraczyk
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.

~~~
saul_goodman
I came away with the opposite interpretation. The author never blames the
readers for doing this. The author even fully understands that the system is
designed to help readers to be "helpful" in this regard, but the system is
clearly misguided. And in this case it's not even a typo, the "bug submitter"
has incorrectly identified a bug which has saddled the author with a potential
loss in sales because of the "low quality" rating it can immediately imbue.

Here we have a system designed to facilitate near real-time feedback trying to
push fixes upstream into a system built on hard-copy which is very non-trivial
to merge patches into. Ultimately it punishes the author out-of-band of the
publisher which is also broken. Sure, you can flail your finger at the stupid
publishers for still printing in hard copy, but that doesn't solve the
problem.

~~~
mgraczyk
> 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

Sure it's not the best system, but the tone is condescending and
unconstructive. I get that it's cool on Twitter to hyperbolize and vent, but
in any other forum this would be cringe-worthy pretension.

~~~
morelisp
Flagging "moreso" as a typo is cringe-worthy pretension in the most literal
sense - it is someone pretending to be a helpful editor and in the process
causing the author to cringe as they are required to perform useless labor.

~~~
rasz
You dont get low quality flag for one typo. Author chose to only share
"moreso" in a bid to garner sympathy. Others joining in complain about being
forced, oh shock and horror, to fix ordinary typos (like missing letters) in
their flawless creations.

------
gnicholas
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
> 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
All done by hand. This was the last round of edits before printing, so
couldn’t risk missing any of the botched edits.

------
EamonnMR
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.

~~~
MBCook
Last I checked it was only available on the Kindle and not (for example) the
phone app.

~~~
ObsoleteNerd
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).

------
nxrabl
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/)

------
shadowgovt
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.

------
phendrenad2
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
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
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.

~~~
DanBC
> 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.

~~~
serf
>...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.

~~~
DanBC
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
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.

------
zorpner
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.

------
Tempest1981
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
Since she mentions it is on sale, the answer is most likely Swordheart:
[https://www.amazon.com/Swordheart-T-Kingfisher-
ebook/dp/B07K...](https://www.amazon.com/Swordheart-T-Kingfisher-
ebook/dp/B07KGDDW7J)

------
panarky
Any system that can be gamed will be gamed.

------
H8crilA
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.

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

~~~
shkkmo
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
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.

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

~~~
danso
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
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.

