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An anonymous reader writes Author Graeme Reynolds found his novel withdrawn from Amazon because of excessive use of hyphens.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
...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.
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!
Haven't they already published several of his books?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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 After less than thirty seconds, the woman had been replaced by sleek, muscular, brown–furred [brown-furred] monster.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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
You're probably right. As soon as I hit 'Submit' I regretted having used the term 'sign'. It's better to distinguish between keycaps, scancodes, character codes and glyphs.
You can't shut us down! The Internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people's ideas!
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
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.
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.
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