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An anonymous reader writes Author Graeme Reynolds found his novel withdrawn from Amazon because of excessive use of hyphens.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?
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.
When you host your content on someone else's systems.
They might mean over 100 unique words...
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.
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.
.
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
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 .
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...
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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