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Amazon "Suppresses" Book With Too Many Hyphens

Posted by samzenpus on from the what-until-they-get-a-load-of-this dept.

An anonymous reader writes Author Graeme Reynolds found his novel withdrawn from Amazon because of excessive use of hyphens.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.'"

8 of 292 comments (clear)

  1. LOL ... w00t? by gstoddart · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So, Amazon is now the grammar police?

    I'm sure there are hundreds (if not thousands) of books on Amazon which have absolutely shit grammar and punctuation.

    To quote the author of the book ... what the actual fuck?

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    1. Re:LOL ... w00t? by Pope+Hagbard · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's so not-news that it was debunked on Reddit and other places a week ago.

      Slashdot's given up on news for nerds, and it's giving up on stuff that matters.

    2. Re:LOL ... w00t? by pla · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So, on a standard US keyboard, is this sign a minus or a hyphen?: -

      Gonna piss off the typography police here, but...

      Yes. They mean the same damned thing, and don't give me any crap about one looking a little longer than the other. A hyphen is a dash is a minus sign is any mid-height horizontal line.

      Readability scores? Seriously? I will damned well use whatever character comes out when I press the key between "0" and "=" on my keyboard, and to hell with your broken automated readers that can't deal with the default character produced by 99.9% of keyboards in the English-speaking world.

  2. Welcome to what happens.... by iamwhoiamtoday · · Score: 3, Insightful

    When you host your content on someone else's systems.

  3. It was probably the wrong kind of "hyphen" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There are unfortunately lots of Unicode characters with the graphical appearance of a horizontal line at roughly the height of the middle line of a capital E. If you use the wrong one then it might look right for you but disastrously wrong for some readers. I suspect this may have happened in this case.

  4. Re:from the what-until-they-get-a-load-of-this dep by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The only way Slashdot would publish a book is if Bennett Haselton wrote it.

  5. Re:from the what-until-they-get-a-load-of-this dep by Oligonicella · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's self-publishing. No, they don't need to proof read.

  6. Re:from the what-until-they-get-a-load-of-this dep by narcc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    without them, we cannot distinguish a panda bear who eats shoots and leaves from a mob hit-man who eats, shoots and leaves.

    No Oxford comma? Mod parent down!

    --
    Required reading for internet skeptics