Slashdot Mirror
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An anonymous reader writes Author Graeme Reynolds found his novel withdrawn from Amazon because of excessive use of hyphens.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.'"
You-should-ask-slashdot-to-publish-the-book-they-LIKE-hyphens.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
f-o-x-t-r-o-t-u-n-i-f-o-r-m-c-h-a-r-l-i-e-k-i-l-o-y-o-u-a-m-a-z-o-n
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.
...there would be no Slashdot summaries.
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?
How would that fraction even be deemed significant?
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
I also think it's about time they take down down on Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" from their mp3 store until someone can do something about the number of notes.
Hyphens! Book too dashing! Hyphens! Warning!
When you host your content on someone else's systems.
Over 100, so lets say there are 150. That's only one every 600 words for a 90,000 word book; basically it's only once every page and a half that it even occurs. Is it really that big of a deal? Not to mention fantasy tends to used the hyphen pretty regularly in names/places. It really just seems an odd thing to attack and try to minimize by the distributor. My guess is that they had one issue and now is just creating other issues. Silly amazon being silly as usual.
The Age of The Whiner.
From over hyphenation, to nerfed weapons in video games, to over regulation of the Internet due to trolls (you know... instead of ignoring them).
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
how-hard-is-it-to-proofread-the-dept
no-im-not-new-here
Failure to follow this advice may result in non-deterministic behavior.
of what Melania G (the Amazon/Kindle exec) is smoking -- it must be really good stuff!
What's next? Taking down Winnie the Pooh because there are too many bounces before Tigger pounces?
There were 100 words hyphenated out of 90,000? So-What?
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.
There is some ambiguity but if we don't care very much, we can go ahead and make an assumption that is often pretty good. When somebody says over X, X is usually the closest round number smaller than the quantity of interest. So, "over 100" is likely to be somewhere between 100 and 200, and almost certainly less than 1000. Moreover, whenever somebody says "over X," I take it to mean that the number is at least X and for the purpose of the argument they're willing to stand by their position even if it were exactly X. Although this particular novel exceeded the threshold, Amazon is claiming that even 100 hyphens per 90,000 words would be too many.
Amazon will be telling authors to break their novels into chapters and paragraphs.
The only way Slashdot would publish a book is if Bennett Haselton wrote it.
Sorry, too many parens.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
.
Maybe I should start hitting the Amazon reviews and flagging all the books whose grammar usage I find confusing.
Let's see, this book uses strange and confusing Capitalization, making it difficult to read. Maybe Amazon should suppress it as well.
Haven't they already published several of his books?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
thats-too-expensive-let-the-cusomers-proof-read-it.
Although, if amazon are taking in 30% of the sales, they do need to proof-read, since traditional publishers have been doing that for centuries.
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 .
I guess Burroughs, Céline and countless other authors need not apply.
The Kindle can load its ebooks from anywhere.
In that case, the market dynamic is more like Android, or like music on the iPod prior to iTunes Plus: supporting only one digital restrictions management platform as well as DRM-free works from anywhere.
A lot of authors choose to use digital restrictions management so that they can sell more than one copy without having it be leaked to a mass infringement ring through an untraceable, judgment-proof member. The owner of an iPod can install DRM-free MP3 or M4A files from anywhere. But for nearly a decade after the iPod came out, the major record labels refused to sell DRM-free audio files over the Internet for fear of a leak to Napster or its successors (Gnutella, KaZaA, WinMX, and eDonkey2000), and iPod supported only the so-called FairPlay DRM platform used by iTunes. The owner of an Android device can install apps from anywhere (with "Unknown sources" turned on) with the APK file. But APK files lack DRM, so a lot of app developers publish their paid apps only through Google Play Store. And for the same reason, a lot of e-book authors publish their paid books only through DRM platforms. Can Kindle load e-books from any DRM platform, or does it support only Amazon's DRM platform?
If we always had to wait until the biggest problems are fixed before fixing the little ones, we would never fix anything.
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I can load any damn PDF file I want on my Kindle, but I can't even change the images for the "screensaver". And no, it's not the cheaper-Kindle-but-you-get-ads model.
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It's self-publishing. No, they don't need to proof read.
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...
Doesn't the dam-ned text get re-flowed by the devi-ce or so-mething? That be-ing said, this is ridi-culous, all my prin-ted books have a few hy-phens, and I've ne-ver had any dif-ficulty rea-ding them. Maybe Ama-zon should just add "don't hyphenate" setting on their reading device and end it once and for all?
There is a unicode character known as a soft hyphen. The soft hyphen indicates where to break a word if it doesn't all fit on a line. This character should be used instead of a hard hyphen most of the time.
Probably OVER 9000!!!
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There is a unicode character known as a soft hyphen.
Hey, this is Slashdot: we don't know about Unicode and we like it that way!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The difference between the two being particularly notable as someone who lives in Florida... the former is most often a native and the latter most often a tourist.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Could have been a proctology book rejected for too many colons.
Mistaking something you don't care for (too many hyphens) as a problem doesn't make it a problem.
They still sell Heideger's being-in-time : and his entire philosophical shtick is using hyphens!
The guy cared enough to complain to Amazon, so it was a problem for him.
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It turns out that he did have a formatting issue in the ebook: http://the-digital-reader.com/... The author coded the ebook by hand and used minus signs in place of hyphens. While that would look okay when you read the ebook, a TTS engine would have issues.
So what if it turned out one of the character names was hyphenated?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Most man-eating alligators are natives... their food, on the other hand...
There goes my book in morse code!
That is all.
And "The Interview" was a problem for Kim (North Korea, not Kardashian) so what? The problem with listening to every whiner is that they get too much power in the process, and normal people start being impacted by all the various "rules" the whiners come up with that serve no purpose other than to annoy everyone else.
Hey, I just described political correctness :-D
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Not handling hyphens, minus signs or whatever: it doesn't surprise me in the least.
Why don't eBook publishers use a typesetting system based on TeX or LaTeX? Good grief. I was formatting complex mathematical formulas and pretty printing them to Postscript and PDF before the lot of you were born. And not just text with mere hyphens.
Is there something I'm missing, or are eBooks a major step backwards in formatting? Really. I can't tell you how many computer science and mathematics eBooks I've returned to Amazon or B&N because of the sh***y formatting of code and math formulas. Not just when eBooks first came out, but on and on, year after year, and it doesn't get better. It strikes me as the laziness of corporations.
From what I understood, the problem was that the hyphens were not the proper character so while one guy complained it probably affected a lot of readers too, especially blind readers who use text-to-speech. What's an annoyance for us might turn into a book that's nearly impossible to read for them.
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Too bad eBook readers are very inconsistent in their support for that. Some readers display an icon indicating an unknown glyph, many fail to insert the hyphen....
IMO, the best you can do is trust the reader's automatic hyphenation and hope for the best. To do so, in your stylesheet, add:
hyphens: auto;
-webkit-hyphens: auto;
-moz-hyphens: auto;
-o-hyphens: auto;
And set these to "manual" if you need to prevent hyphenation in certain spots (e.g. headings).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Amazon decided to pull a book because of punctuation. I guess next time it sentence structure, or maybe using certain words too many times. And words in sentences lead to ideas, so any ideas that Amazon feels affects the reader in a negative manner should also be blocked. From punctuation, to language, to the author's thoughts and intents of putting word to paper, once Amazon starts to believe that it is the arbiter of what is good, or allowable to it's readers, then authors and readers should decide that maybe Amazon isn't what's best for them.
I thought, they preferred, commas, that have, no logical reason, to be, there.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Can't we have something like "net-neutrality" for e-readers and video viewers?
I mean, it is kind of the same principle.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
That's what I meant. Posting too early in the morning...
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
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.
Waiting for amazon to ban Blood Meridian for shitty interpunction.
I imagine #they'd totally $freak at a @book about &perl.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
From Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
<acerbic>
These days 75% of all Slashdot posts seem to involve drilling down to get the original story straight. Tell me, when did a mass-confusion clusterfuck become the new nerd foreplay? Kindle typography, meet declining Slashdot editorial standards. You've got more in common than you think.
</acerbic>
Actually, there are technical barriers, and steep ones. Amazon does not use a standard eBook format, but rather uses its own custom binary blob. Because Amazon does not publish information about that format, there is exactly one tool that is known to generate this format in a guaranteed forward-compatible way. That tool, kindlegen, was written by Amazon, and the licensing terms from 2.0 onwards (the first version to support nontrivial formatting) do not allow you to use it for creating content that is sold outside Amazon's store. So in order to distribute content elsewhere, you have to either:
None of these choices is viable, IMO. As such, I consider Kindle to be by far the single most locked-down eBook reader on the market today. At least when Apple puts licensing terms like that into their book generation software, they have the decency to document the format so that you aren't forced to use their toolchain....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Too bad eBook readers are very inconsistent in their support for that. Some readers display an icon indicating an unknown glyph, many fail to insert the hyphen....
Alas.
That soft hyphen would have been a blessing for the German e-books. Some texts are flush with the overly long words, making them very hard to read.
But Kindle (last time I checked) doesn't support it.
Neither the Calibre and few other e-book viewers/editors I have tried in the past.
In other words, in my experience the support is uniform and consistent: no support whatsoever, sadly.
P.S. On top of it, the Kindle devices I have, also have the rendering and text selection bugs when displaying/selecting the text around words (even if they are hyphenated) which are longer than the single visible line.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
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 .
This, this and this.
Awhile ago, we saw a story on this site about a chocolate printer. Of course this was actually a chocolate-printer, a device that prints using chocolate. However, without the hyphen, it refers to a printer that is made out of chocolate. Without the hyphen, what are we to make of The Chocolate Lover's Cookbook?
Hyphens are also important when one needs to disambiguate between compound adjectives and compound nouns. What's a high school building? A building that's a high school (a high-school building) or a school building that is high (a high school-building)?
Hyphens are just another example of how we treat punctuation marks as though they were boogers, something to be expunged and discarded, kept away from ourselves and others. But without them, we cannot distinguish a panda bear who eats shoots and leaves from a mob hit-man who eats, shoots and leaves.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
"Too many" is not "wrong kind"
We should be able to articulate what we intended much better than was done here, especially those people criticizing literature and editing skills. If this was a formatting error (as was indicated) then that was the problem, the letter should have indicated it. And since it was a formatting problem, it was easy to fix, as was proven in this matter.
There was no need to remove the book, and a human (not an automated response) could (and should) have politely asked for a correction. Amazon simply came across as a boor.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Do tourists not eat alligators? Don't they sell it in restaurants.
I know they didn't have it on the menu at Disney.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
There is a unicode character known as a soft hyphen.
Hey, this is Slashdot: we don't know about Unicode and we like it that way!
What's unicode in ASCII?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I-know-it's-their-imprint-and-all-;-but-sheesh!-Talk-about-your-grammar-nazis...
You know, a C# textbook I got on Amazon really did have too many { and ; in it.
actually.We.Are.More.Into.Dots.Around.Here
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
Hyphens are just another example of how we treat punctuation marks as though they were boogers, something to be expunged and discarded, kept away from ourselves and others. But without them, we cannot distinguish a panda bear who eats shoots and leaves from a mob hit-man who eats, shoots and leaves.
This.
I cannot count how many times I have been excoriated in these very pages for my "excessive" use of quotation-marks.
I then feel compelled to "defend" myself, citing the grammatical rules that show all the alternate uses of same.
Fortunately, that usually shuts up those people.
They are a distribution and a print on demand service, not a publisher.
XDInd
I imagine #they'd totally $freak at a @book about &perl.
Or even better, APL.
Doesn't the dam-ned text get re-flowed by the devi-ce or so-mething? That be-ing said, this is ridi-culous, all my prin-ted books have a few hy-phens, and I've ne-ver had any dif-ficulty rea-ding them. Maybe Ama-zon should just add "don't hyphenate" setting on their reading device and end it once and for all?
The real question is, did he "hard-hyphen" the words, such that they wouldn't re-flow correctly; or did he just have lots of compound-adjectives, etc. that would actually call for hyphenation?
Maybe they had a lot of characters with hyphenated names? Or exotic locales?
This is why we can't let Amazon become a virtual monopoly on books... Because they have ZERO obligation to inform the public of their ditto risk decisions. Flagging an upcoming book for "too many hyphens" is pretty severe censorship of the worst kind... AUTOMATED.
I get the Mpls Star-Tribune via Kindle subscription, and usually read it on my phone.
Quite often articles in said journal are messed up when I read them, with all the long words coming out hyp-hen-ated.
Because Amazon does not publish information about that format, there is exactly one tool that is known to generate this format in a guaranteed forward-compatible way. That tool, kindlegen, was written by Amazon, and the licensing terms from 2.0 onwards (the first version to support nontrivial formatting) do not allow you to use it for creating content that is sold outside Amazon's store. So in order to distribute content elsewhere, you have to either...
Although I haven't used the tool myself, Amazon's description says that "KindleGen is a command line tool which enables publishers to work in an automated environment with a variety of source content including HTML, XHTML or EPUB." So unless there is something more to the licensing terms than you're suggesting, there shouldn't be any problem with creating your content in an open format, and then using KindleGen to generate the content for the Amazon store.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I imagine #they'd totally $freak at a @book about &perl.
Or even better, APL.
Or Brainfuck, more politely known as B****fuck.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The en-dash is primarily used for both a minus sign and to indicate ranges in numbers (from 2–3 days). The em-dash is used as a kind of parenthesis (I am saying—not for the first time—that I am mad).
On a Mac you make an en-dash with option-hyphen, and an em-dash with option-shift-hyphen. I haven't used a PC for this kind of work in at least 10 years, but I do recall that entering en- and em-dashes was a hassle.
Have gnu, will travel.
They do sometimes but generally alligators tend to eat (stupid) tourists.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
As far as I know, Nook is the only e-reader to support hyphenation. There may be one or two other readers with newer versions of the RMSDK that also support it, but I don't know of any offhand.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
I expect it's an artifact of the coversion to e-book. I've seen it a lot in self-published books. Cases where words that shouldn't be hyphenated are and it's very obvious when it happens. That's the only reason I can see for this happening.
Which tastes more like chicken? Human or Alligator?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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.
Flooding their market with junk books devalues the market as a whole.
Or why nobody understands what "chicken fried steak" is, but might very well understand what chicken-fried steak is.
Maybe it's THE CUSTOMER who is always right!
Sorry, that hyphen does nothing. What on Earth is one of those when it's at home?!?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
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
It probably has a better chance than my book: Whitespace by example
Required reading for internet skeptics
What on Earth is one of those when it's at home?!?
Cannot parse.
Does Amazon sell collections of Emily Dickenson poetry? She was mad into the humble hyphen.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
My "Brainfuck for Dummies" book will have a lot of buggy sample code now that Amazon has decided I can only make 1 decrement per 10000 instructions. So I have to implement Brainfuck unit tests... and I just finished the chapter on how to write the code delinter and the JIT compiler!
Judging that you're not American, "Chicken-fried steak" is a tenderized steak, breaded and fried in the manner that "fried chicken" is done. Common usage/writing leaves out the hyphen (even on restaurant menus), so it's unclear that it's a compound adjective. As a result, people assume that it contains chicken or have no idea what to expect.
There goes my idea to self-publish "The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe in Morse Code".
~Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, but Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
So, schnitzel then?
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Different breading, but similar idea.
Shoot. There goes my idea of self-publishing a book written entirely in morse code.
I just did a quick cat / tr / grep / wc on Lord of the Rings, and got:
Fellowship of the Rings: 1361 hyphenated words out of 178,672
The Two Towers: 1047 of 154,403
Return of the King: 829 of 135,285
This guy gets kicked to the curb for 100 hyphens out of 90,000 words? Pooh. It's a matter of style.
It's not just the technical barriers. I own a Nook, which used bog-standard ePub. To buy a book from B&N, I go to the store page and buy a book. It then downloads automatically. To buy a book from elsewhere, I buy it and download it to my computer, plug my Nook into my computer, and copy it over. It's not that big a hassle, but lots of people aren't going to do that, or even realize that it's possible. It's just not as smooth, and I can't just do it anywhere I've got WiFi.
With a really slick process for some stuff, even a mild hassle for the other stuff is going to be a real competitive disadvantage.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Oxford commas are optional, and recommended when they improve clarity. In this case, the one after "eats" is enough. Besides, I was quoting the title of the well-known book.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Auto-hyphenation is built into WebKit, so unless they took steps to deliberately break it, it should work in all readers based on WebKit. To my knowledge:
I was not aware of Nook supporting it. That's surprising, given that they're based on RMSDK. Hmm. Upon digging further, RMSDK egregiously violates the CSS specification by using "adobe" as a vendor prefix, then proceeds to also use the wrong CSS property name, resulting in the property "adobe-hyphenate" instead of "-adobe-hyphens" as it should be, with values of "none", "explicit", and "auto" instead of "none", "manual", and "auto". Nice, job, Adobe.... [redacted swearing at what feels like the hundredth instance of Adobe flagrantly violating the CSS specification that I've run into personally]
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
At issue is the fact that Kindle readers can only side-load content in MOBI format (plus non-reflowable horrors), and MOBI-format files can only (usefully) be produced by KindleGen. So the fact that you can sell the content in open formats through other stores is mostly irrelevant; you can't sell the content in open formats to Kindle users because they can't side-load an EPUB, and you can't sell the content in MOBI format because the license for the tool that trivially translates your source files into MOBI files won't let you resell those MOBI files outside Amazon's stores.
So short of you selling it in an open format and telling your users to run a command-line tool, or telling them to install Java and then install Kindle Previewer (which, among other things, provides a crude GUI for KindleGen), what you're advocating isn't a realistic solution.
With that said, Amazon's licensing changes annoyed me enough that I've seriously considered making the Kindle edition of my books available "free for registered EPUB users", so that users submit a web form and provide a copy of the EPUB book obtained from any EPUB store, and a script on the server verifies it and emails them a free copy of the MOBI book, thus effectively selling the MOBI book through every other online store, while still strictly complying with the terms of Amazon's license by only using it "to format works to be distributed at no charge". But although that would be easy for me to do, that's the sort of thing that 99% of writers out there couldn't pull off.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I can't speak for iBooks. But for Kindle if it's supported in Kindle Previewer, then someone screwed up pretty carelessly. Neither my Kindle Fire HD (first generation), Kindle Paperwhite (second generation), nor the Kindle app on iPhone support hyphenation in KF8 books.
As for RMSDK: Agree about the vendor prefix. However, their property predates the hyphens property being officially specced out by several months; it's not terribly surprising that they don't match up quite right. (Plus, the default is "auto" instead of "manual".) Once they had the property, they were pretty much stuck with it for compatibility reasons.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
And you think proof reading is the only difference between a amazon digital book and a traditionally published book? A paper book publisher does cover design, has a printing press to print books and ships books to distributors and retailers. Those are the main reasons for the small cut for the author. Digital books have no printing and transportation costs. Plus, the paper book author had no choice but to get what tiny income he could because there was no practical way to sell books without a publisher. With the internet, you don't need any publisher, not even amazon.
Simply hosting a few MB file (the book) and processing a credit card payment is not enough to justify charging 30%. The need to proof read too. Apple checks (proof reads) apps before they are published in the app store.
...which is what they should be called.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
It's not difficult to parse the syntax, even if you can't grasp the semantic meaning.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
One of what? Why does it have a home?
And you think proof reading is the only difference between a amazon digital book and a traditionally published book?
Don't put words in my mouth. I handled the cover design for my books, though the publisher did offer to do it and did convert it into a format that was better suited for a book cover. I wrote technical books, so the publisher also paid for technical assessments to make sure I wasn't wrong along with the editing. Those are very valuable services.
Simply hosting a few MB file (the book) and processing a credit card payment is not enough to justify charging 30%.
But hosting a few dead trees in a warehouse is worth 50% of a book? Amazon is the 300lb gorilla in book sales, so they'll charge what they think they can get away with. If another vendor comes along and gets the name recognition that Amazon has and only takes 20%, then Amazon may change their ways.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that authors have lots of options to get their work out. But the choice is they either get about 5% and have a huge infrastructure behind them to help get their work out, promoted, and looking nice, or doing most of it themselves and getting 70% and hope they have an underground hit that lots of people buy.
Sounds to me like they've gotten a call from a now infamous Reverend from Mississippi who called a now infamous radio station regarding the foul language, despite the warnings preceding it, contained within a now infamous record of spoken word by the now infamous George Carlin.
It's no different. First it was radio broadcast, then it was Television broadcast, now it's cable and satellite, video games have ratings and restrictions too. Here comes books, and finally, the internet.
Then there will be nothing at all to stop the Ministry of Truth. Beware the thought police!
We now interrupt this post for the daily two-minutes-hate.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
A) A chicken-fried steak. What is one of those? (Now answered.)
B) The "when it's at home" is just a turn of phrase used to emphasise cluelessness. At least where I'm from.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
To someone unfamiliar with that idiom, it sounds like someone who isn't fluent in English. Now that I know what it means, I just think it's weird to hear that phrase used for a non-person entity.
Your response is predicated on the assumption that the Amazon Algorithms operate in a logic-based environment. This has not been proven to be the case. Amazon can remove books and other items from its store arbitrarily, and according to no logic known to humankind. It does the same to reviews of books and other products. I've gotten ebooks (from major publishers, I might add) with artifacts of conversion that were far more egregious than hyphens (leftover XML code, LaTeX symbols, etc.) from Amazon. Some books will feature complaints about formatting or editing in dozens of reviews and Amazon does nothing, while others, like this one, will be pulled for unsubstantiated customer complaints, or worse--customer complaints about an entirely different book! The almighty algorithms are great 90% of the time, but humans do still need to oversee.
Whereas "chicken fried steak" probably indicates that one is in possession of domestic fowl with culinary skills...
You could be right. I'm certainly usually the first one in the Amazon sux line.
According to Merriam Webster, "hit man" should not be hyphenated ...
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
Doesn't the dam-
ned text get re-
flowed by the devi-
ce or so-
mething? That be-
ing said, this is ridi-
culous, all my prin-
ted books have a few hy-
phens, and I've ne-
ver had any dif-
ficulty rea-
ding them. Maybe Ama-
zon should just add "don't hyphenate" setting on their reading device and end it once and for all?
What if you are writing about a new thing that you use multiple words to describe The Child-emperor was raised by an adoptive family. Leaving out the hyphens can be confusing. Leaving them in, almost never causes any confusion.
Learn to love Alaska
I'd argue that if any WebKit-based reader doesn't support it, then someone screwed up pretty carelessly, but that's just me. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
According to Merriam Webster, "hit man" should not be hyphenated ...
Alas, Merriam-Webster is part of the problem. A "hit-man" is an assassin, but a "hit man" is a man who has been hit.
I confess that my opinion on hyphens has been influenced strongly by an article I read years ago, and for which I can no longer find a link. The author of that piece ranted in particular about irregularities in Merriam-Webster on the matter of hyphens. For example, "bee-eater", a beautiful bird whose diet includes stinging insects, becomes in Merriam-Webster a "bee eater", a bee who eats.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
We'll never know what happened last weekend to little Robert: he either helped his uncle, jack, off a horse or he helped his uncle jack off a horse.
And the horse has four legs and flies.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It's not the hyphens.
*ANYTHING* that cuts another vampire/zombie/werewolf book needs to be viewed as a goodthing . . .
hawk
Hyphen, Most commonly used by every one. For a punctuation, Penalizing the book wasn't expected..
If you're the sort of person who relies on the likes of Amazon (high volume, low-margin pile-it-high-and-sell-it-cheap merchants) as your personal arbiter of taste and relevance, then yes you'd devalue your market. However, by taking Amazon as a reviewer of books, you've already suspended your judgement to a high degree.
A couple of weeks ago I was pointed to Amazon by a friend who'd written a new book (not, by about 10 books, his first publication, but I think his first with Amazon). Amazon would only admit to the existence of a Kindle version - which I might have considered if it were a manual or a text-based book. But for a book allegedly rich in my friend's generally excellent photography of his several month's travelling in Patagonia and southern South America, a screen simply isn't the appropriate format.
So, eventually, Amazon, by pushing their Kindle version lost about £10 of trade in Kindle editions, and the ink-on-paper publishers got about £70 for the print editions (of the photo book, and the accompanying travelogue book) ; way to go, Amazon!
The wife and I noted their efforts to force us off getting discs form Lovefilm and onto downloading shit off their website somewhere. Nope ; not interested ; account cancelled and a pits-on-polycarbonate account opened with a different provider. Oh dear. What a pity. How sad. Never. mind.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
The term "Oxford comma" exists only because the term "Chicago omission" would not indicate something visible. There was no such thing as an Oxford comma until the Chicago omission was invented. Omitting the comma creates a jarring inconsistency, results in unnecessary doubletakes, and fails to convey the cadences and inflections of the spoken sentence.
Ah, but state those rules out loud (assuming you are already confident as to what they are) and the comma or its lack will almost certainly be apparent in your speech, at least to an astute listener. Which is also the reason I use it sporadically in "and" conjunctions as well - in that case the alternatives are usually roughly equivalent, but may have subtly different implications. I write like I speak, and commas appear in the places where I pause to separate concepts. It may not always adhere to the formal rules, but is usually clearly comprehensible. I think.
Which raises the question: how to write a sentence to proactively state that you do in fact mean for "draw and discard" to be a discrete concept?
If I say "I have one pile each for for my carrots, lettuce, , macaroni and cheese.", does that clarify that I do in fact have three piles*? The english language would well benefit from an equivalent to mathematical parenthesis, or perhaps something somewhat more expressive. Conciseness in language is not something that should have to depend on the normal usage of language being concise - it never will be. For maximum utility and adoption it should be something where the various common permutations can be seamlessly dropped in to a casual conversation where conciseness is useful, before disappearing again into the rough-and-tumble realities of casual conversation.
* Yes, I do consider .", to be the correct punctuation - how else would you unambiguously characterize the way that sentence should be read?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
*shrug* I'm sure you say plenty of stuff that would sound weird to me.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Like chicken fried steak, for starters....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'