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Amazon "Suppresses" Book With Too Many Hyphens
An anonymous reader writes Author Graeme Reynolds found his novel withdrawn from Amazon because of excessive use of hyphens. He received an email from Amazon about his werewolf novel, High Moor 2: Moonstruck, because a reader had complained that there were too many hyphens. "When they ran an automated spell check against the manuscript they found that over 100 words in the 90,000-word novel contained that dreaded little line," he says. "This, apparently 'significantly impacts the readability of your book' and, as a result, 'We have suppressed the book because of the combined impact to customers.'"
At least link to the actual story, rather than the discussion of the story.
Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation.
Jeez. That was in the second paragraph of TFA.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Actually, it looks like Amazon is the typography police. For whatever reason, the book seems to use en-dashes instead of hyphens (check the preview on Amazon). That is an abomination. Where the message changed from "please replace en-dashes with hyphens" to "don't use hyphens" is anyone's guess.
You can't shut us down! The Internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people's ideas!
Addendum: It turns out the author used the minus sign instead of the hyphen. That (a) looks wrong on the page, (b) breaks screen readers, (c) confuses readability scores and (d) makes this not news.
You can't shut us down! The Internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people's ideas!
Fangs burst through her gums as her jaw elongated into a razor–filled [razor-filled] muzzle and her ears elongated. After less than thirty seconds, the woman had been replaced by sleek, muscular, brown–furred [brown-furred] monster.
Actually, your title is an (admittedly exaggerated) example of how hyphens can assist readability. The hyphens make clear that you are using a compound adjective. In fact, a common error in writing is omitting hyphens when they are necessary. For example, someone writing I saw a man eating alligator probably meant I saw a man-eating alligator .
An en-dash is much longer than a hyphen.
So, on a standard US keyboard, is this sign a minus or a hyphen?: -
It's a hyphen. A standard keyboard layout has no minus sign, not even in the keypad. The author of the book explicitly specified a Unicode minus sign wherever a hyphen should've been because "I try to avoid using direct ascii hash codes because some ereaders can misinterpret them"
You can't shut us down! The Internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people's ideas!
Hyphen.
As well:
— is an em-dash
– is an en-dash
is a minus, which you cannot see in Slashdot...
Looks like Amazon was being dumb.
The problem was not too many hyphens, but rather that there were no hyphens. He had used the minus sign and that breaks some text-speech readers.
Graeme has already fixed it.
This is Graeme's blog telling the story, the problem, and the fix.
https://graemereynolds.wordpre...
A standard keyboard layout has no minus sign, not even in the keypad.
That is very arguable. In fact it's just wrong. The key is a "minus" key, labelled with a "minus" sign, and in Windows at least it produces a scan code the constant for which is VK_SUBTRACT. What may ultimately be rendered in various text-entry contexts as a result of pressing that key may or may not be a minus sign, but the key is most definitely a minus key with a minus sign on it.
Propose such a "simple" perl script.
Here are some cases it should know how to deal with:
Between numbers (note that slashdot eats some of these characters; the numbers below all have different dashes or related symbols between "555" and "1000"):
"Pages 555–1000 discuss this matter" (this should be an internumeral dash, which is typically an en dash, U+2013).
"Her phone number is 5551000" (this should be a figure dash, U+2012).
"There were actually a lot more of them than the estimated 555—1000, to be precise" (this should be an em dash, U+2014).
"The teacher asked me to solve 5551000. I told him negative 455 was the answer." (this should be a minus sign, U+2212)
Between letters/words you have a similar problem: even if you know it shouldn't be a minus sign (which symbolic algebra makes tough to know for sure, but suppose you could surmount that), you generally have no idea what kind of dash or hyphen it should be turned into.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
The book was professionally edited. It's by a British author using British english. While some of the hyphens could have been removed they were not grammatically incorrect. The problem seems to be that Amazon does not recognise British grammar and punctuation differences.
In traditional book publishing, the author gets about 5% of the list. The publisher sells the book to a retailer for 50% of the list price and the author typically get about 10% of what the publisher sells it for. At least that's what it was in my case. So getting 70% on a self-published book isn't a bad deal. Though editors are still important.
Spoken language contains many variations of timing and inflection that clarify such things. Punctuation exists specifically to impart a rough approximation of those subtleties to the comparatively crude written language.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.