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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An anonymous reader writes Author Graeme Reynolds found his novel withdrawn from Amazon because of excessive use of hyphens.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.'"
...there would be no Slashdot summaries.
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.
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!
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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