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

https://twitter.com/ursulav/status/1209518819397505024

by danso • 7 years ago

144 146 7 years 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.

mlyle2• 7 years 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...

thaumasiotes5• 7 years 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.

MBCook4• 7 years 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.

simion3142• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

stock_toaster• 7 years 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?

salawat• 7 years ago

I know right? They forgot the '.' between 'a' and 'out'.

Wait... What am I supposed to be parsing for again?

MBCook4• 7 years ago

iOS typos. I try to edit for them but seem to have missed that one.

Baeocystin5• 7 years ago

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.

morelisp5• 7 years ago

That the author in question can't be bothered to keep a current copy of their manuscript ...

Why should the author, rather than the publisher, be expected to produce a public-upload-ready file on demand? (If the deadlines other authors are reporting in the thread are accurate, I wouldn't even reasonably expect a full-time major publisher to hit them - and during the last week of the year?!)

mintplant2• 7 years ago

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.

eropple• 7 years ago

You are comparing apples and hand grenades here. Major publishers have a budget--but they also have account managers with Amazon who contact them if something goes sideways. This is somebody, whether intentionally or not, kicking an indie (she's got one publication through Simon and Schuster, the rest are Amazon self-publications) writer in the shins.

wizzwizz42• 7 years ago

This is Amazon kicking an indie writer in the shins after noticing that the book had a pull request.

colomon2• 7 years ago

Indie writer isn't exactly right, she's a successful children's book author under her real name, with at least a dozen books out from Puffin. (Also a Hugo award winning comic book creator, but that was self-published.)

But yes, writing for adults as T. Kingfisher she's mostly self-published, and that was the case with the book in question, I believe.

Marazan• 7 years ago

The problem is not you the reporter. The problem is the automated Amazon system that processes your report and the obviously fucked up way it operates.

It is abuseable as all hell as demonstrated in the replies to the tweet. Even when not being used to make people's life miserable it is a failure of a system.

wang_li2• 7 years ago

The problem is the automated Amazon system that processes your report and the obviously fucked up way it operates.

There should be a button available to authors and publishers that says "i dispute these flags" and when the button is pushed, the flags are put into a temporary status and the reviewer's/submitter's real name and address is provided to the author so the author can take them to court for damages. If the flagged items are just low quality then the author would lose in court and the submitted flagged items could then be assessed against the work. If the flagged items are not legitimate, then the person who submitted the bad reports can write a nice check to the author and amazon can then drop the bad reports from their system. The idea that everything can, or should, be handled within a platform (facebook, twitter, amazon, apple, google, etc.) is idiotic. There is a legal system for a reason and it's so that we can get a consistent and fair adjudication of our disputes.

rasz6• 7 years ago

Amazon lets potential clients know of problems with the merchandise, what a terrible system indeed!

LoSboccacc6• 7 years ago

yeah, hurting sales is the best way to make the author accountable, where did vote with your wallet went here?

he can at any time publish a revision and be done with it

mcphage3• 7 years ago

he can at any time publish a revision and be done with it

How can you revise things that aren’t mistakes?

lscotte2• 7 years ago

Yes, as an author, part of your job is to proofread your work. If this author published the work before it was actually ready, than I have zero sympathy for the author respective of the comments - next time publish quality work rather than blaming the readers. And yes, I know how hard it is to edit a publication, knowing several published writers - all of whom understand that editing is time consuming and much work, but simply part of the process in turning quality work.

ChrisSD2• 7 years ago

Firstly the author isn't blaming readers, they're blaming Amazon. Secondly, if a typo is found in your work would you expect it to immediately be pulled from sale? What if there was no typo at all and the reader was mistaken? Is it fair to pull it from sale until the non-mistake is "resolved"? Can you not see how this is open to abuse?

gbear6052• 7 years ago

In this case, the work was quality and the reader was wrong. But there’s no way for the author to respond with that.

anonytrary2• 7 years ago

No, but I think the tweeter is making the point that there should be a distinction between actual typos and slang/vernacular. Apparently, there isn't a distinction and his typo rate is thus artificially higher than it should be. Seems like a valid point to me -- there needs to be a distinction or at least some automated checking to ignore reports for informal words...

hermitdev• 7 years ago

Also, what about books of the like of "A Clockwork Orange" or "1984", where the author defines their own vernacular? If you'd run either by a standard spelling/grammar checker such as those included with Word, both of the aforementioned books would be flagged, despite both being highly regarded classics.

ianai3• 7 years ago

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

gtirloni2• 7 years ago

I can read it just fine without logging in or unblocking the website.

ianai3• 7 years ago

Twitter is 127.0.0.1 on my hosts.

danso2• 7 years 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.

thaumasiotes5• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Any system that can be gamed will be gamed.

mgraczyk2• 7 years 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.

amingilani2• 7 years 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.

mintplant2• 7 years 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.

jakemal• 7 years ago

Yes and no. Even if they are acting with good intentions, it's still causing negative consequences for the author. I can understand it would be especially frustrating if the "correction" was incorrect.

saul_goodman• 7 years ago

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.

jjoonathan• 7 years ago

Flagging something as "low quality" because of a few typos seems utterly absurd, even if the typos are real.

mgraczyk2• 7 years ago

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.

vezycash• 7 years ago

I once saw a one-star review on Udemy.

The reviewer's complaint: "Author has a non-English accent." I would understand if the author's speech was unintelligible but it wasn't.

notatoad• 7 years ago

The author never blames the readers for doing this.

the author seems to know they shouldn't be blaming the reader, but the whole tone of the twitter thread absolutely is blaming the reader. i don't know how you can read the linked thread and come away with an impression that the author isn't frustrated at the reader who reported the issues.

morelisp5• 7 years ago

These authors should start from a position of gratefulness that their work is being published and read.

This is a multi-award winning author with incredibly strong ties to sf fan, including fan writer, communities and a huge professional network. But sure, she should be grateful Amazon is giving her amateur editorial advice and (thanks to this system, basically negative) exposure.

ChrisSD2• 7 years ago

I think the author is very explicit that they aren't blaming users:

It’s not your fault, Amazon doesn’t exactly advertise that if you make too many notes, the system informs the author they’re pulling the book.

And:

That’s the problem! It weaponized people’s desire to help by having a computer go “oh, this must mean the book is Bad.” It’s not your fault!

The author blames Amazon:

Sigh. I’m sure they thought they were helping, except all that really happens is that Amazon puts flags on the sales page to tell people it’s a terrible book and the author drowns in a morass of old files in a half dozen formats trying to fix things.

nkrisc• 7 years ago

The author clearly blames Amazon multiple times for not making clear the connection between action (reader marks typos) and outcome (book gets "low quality" label and makes busywork for author).

As I reader I would not expect that to be the outcome and if I knew that's what would happen, I would just try to contact the author directly.

rasz6• 7 years ago

As I reader I expect the author got paid for what you have called busywork so I dont have to guess thru cat on the keyboard moments.

danso2• 7 years ago

Maybe the feedback is unhelpful, but I don't see anything here indicating that the readers are acting in bad faith.

The author explicitly does not say this:

https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/1209544781468180480

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.

geofft• 7 years ago

These authors should start from a position of gratefulness that their work is being published and read.

Real hard to be grateful that your work is being published and read if people are clicking buttons that cause those works to get de-published and un-readable.

raverbashing• 7 years ago

They're not acting in bad faith (probably) but they shouldn't try to fix things that aren't broken or they aren't an expert in.

The "wisdom of the crowds" isn't. Your average commenter, even on HN makes a lot of basic English mistakes (I do my share too, but I try fixing when I have the chance).

anigbrowl4• 7 years ago

These authors should start from a position of gratefulness that their work is being published and read.

Why? They did a pile of work and someone chose to purchase some of it. Are they somehow less deserving of respect than people in other lines of work?

rasz6• 7 years ago

Pointing flaws seen as disrespectful is a very SJW worldview.

mattigames2• 7 years ago

I think you are the one coming with pretencious entitletement, pretending you can give power to third party actors so unreliable as the average consumer and not expect to waste the time of thousands of authors; such power should be much more tightly controlled and Amazon knows that, maybe something like a dashboard where you can specify why the "typo" is there so next time someone reports it as such they can read why is it actually not a typo, and only _then_ can someone report it again and only _then_ get real consequences such as flags next to the book and other actions that economically damage the authors.

deathanatos2• 7 years ago

That's not how I was interpreting the tweets. The author is fine with the feedback on their writing; what they're not fine with is an automated system tagging their work as "low quality" if enough erroneous feedback (or subjective feedback that perhaps the author disagrees with) is submitted.

(See my other comment[1]; it sounded to me too that the feedback was on text intentionally spelled with non-standard spellings, but that's different from a "typo".)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21876500

EamonnMR• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

MBCook4• 7 years ago

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

ObsoleteNerd• 7 years 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).

thaumasiotes5• 7 years 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.

danschumann2• 7 years ago

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

rasz6• 7 years ago

your absolutelly wright

shkkmo• 7 years 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.

danschumann2• 7 years 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• 7 years 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/

gnicholas2• 7 years 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).

_fbpt• 7 years 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?

gnicholas2• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Charles Stross clarifies the situation: 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• 7 years 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.

shadowgovt• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

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

colomon2• 7 years ago

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

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

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