Amazon Quality Control

[Dawn]

As a reader, I have quite a bit of problems with kindle books with certain authors. Bad spacing is the worst. So, it is good to know that someone other than me is letting Amazon know. I normally let them and the author know . Also, it's very infrequent that I get page numbers with these books and I would like to see that more.

[Helge]

I think it's a good idea, both for readers and writers. If I run into too many mistakes (of whatever kind) while reading the sample, I'm not going to buy the book.
As an author, I appreciate if people let me know when they find mistakes. I hired an editor, but even they can't fix them all. :)

[[deleted user]]

I was just contacted by Roberta Kagan, of whom i am editing one of her books. She told me that after February, Amazon was gong to decide if they needed to pull a book for excessive errors/bad formatting. Really, I think it may be irritating to the authors, but then again, Amazon has a reputation to protect, and they are a profit partner in your publishing venture. Good editing and formatting is good for everybody involved, the reader, the author, and Amazon.

[[deleted user]]

I think it's a good thing, one less problem for a reader to worry about when buying a book. It's also good for authors who want to provide a quality product. I'd certainly want to know about any formatting issues in any of my books so I could fix them.

[Lincoln]

I use kindle previewer as well. I also appreciate when people let me know instead of just posting negative reviews. I like the idea that we can all work together to improve all books. But, then again, life is competition.

[Britain]

Dawn wrote: "As a reader, I have quite a bit of problems with kindle books with certain authors. Bad spacing is the worst. So, it is good to know that someone other than me is letting Amazon know. I normally le..."

I was under the impression that page numbers were misleading in eBooks. The number of pages in an eBook isn't fixed, because the reader might be switching devices throughout the book, and each device has a different limit to what it can show on a page. Would it not make it easier for readers to ignore page numbers and just use the bookmark feature instead? What if you were on page 325 while reading on your phone, but when you switched to your Kindle and manually turned to page 325, it was miles ahead and you accidentally spoiled something for yourself? Or perhaps I have misunderstood how page numbers in an eBook work.

To keep this comment relevant to the original question, I think those quality control emails are very important. They are probably the only thing that separates the truly dedicated authors from the lazy ones. A dedicated author will use the feedback to fix problems and prevent future issues; a lazy author who is just hoping to make a quick buck through that "self-publishing thing" won't bother with it. I think it is a necessary part of the equation if we want to help elevate the status of self-published books in the eyes of readers.

[L.S.]

Dawn wrote: "As a reader, I have quite a bit of problems with kindle books with certain authors. Bad spacing is the worst. So, it is good to know that someone other than me is letting Amazon know. I normally le..."

I'm not sure if I've seen any ebooks with page numbers. How does that even work, given that people are all reading them on different sized screens? A 'page' on my kindle is at least twice as big as a 'page' on my phone.

Anyway, this is definitely a step in the right direction. It's good that Amazon is pushing authors to make their work better, rather than letting readers be irritated/disappointed.

[M.L.]

The Kindle instructions say do not use page numbers. (It takes them out anyway). It uses location numbers and they vary depending on the e-reader.

Sure, corporate has quality control in some form, so makes sense for Amazon.

[Riley, Viking Extraordinaire]

Wait, so Amazon is going to have a program go through my book and point out my errors to me if enough people have complained about it? On the one hand, awesome, gives another set of eyes on the work, and that's never bad. (Even if they are robot eyes.)
On the other hand, this smells of big brother. What happens if you have a character with a really strong accent, and you just happen to have a few people complain about it. Either way, Amazon is the one in the driver's seat. You don't have to publish your books there, after all.

[Christina]

Amazon has always had a place to report formatting errors. Nine times out of ten, the author doesn't hear about it because the error is a glitch on that particular copy (this was a huge problem early on with books that cut off mid-download) and Amazon addresses the issue.

Actual formatting errors I imagine happen,but there are so many ways to preview that it should be a simple matter of thumbing through the final upload. I can't tell you how many times I've discovered annoyances like an errant indentation or random font size change that wasn't there before. If people are letting theae get through, then I think it is great that Amazon is notifying people.

However, I only think this is happening when there are too many returns. When you return a book, it asks why and both formatting and typos are options that can be selected. Unless you see a ton of returns, you probably won't be notified.

[[deleted user]]

I once downloaded a book that the whole text was red!. I contacted the author and he said he uploaded black and white. So I can see that downloads may corrupt.

[J.J.]

Someone pointed out on the Amazon forums how this might wreck havoc on SFF books where authors invent words for their universes. Likewise, if this determination is left to a program, I would be leery of its accuracy if it is entirely up to this program to determine whether or not your book remains on the shelf. I find the grammar check in Word to be absolutely horrible. Half the time I use it's/its and they're/their/there, it suggests the wrong use when the context couldn't be clearer. Just yesterday, it suggested a question mark in a sentence with not a single word hinting to a question.

I agree it would be nice to know of problems, but I would be afraid about the availability of my book being at the mercy of a program with potentially worse grammar skills than a 3 year old.

[Owen]

Time will but my understanding has been that this is focused primary on formatting and readability issues, not language issues. We did get such a notice for one of our books, and it was quite a while ago so I can't recall the exact issue, but it wasn't typos or grammar. I do recall that it didn't show up in our copy.

I contacted Amazon, since they said to notify them when the problem had been corrected, told them I could not see the error in the source file or my kindle edition an asked them what to do. They replied that they'd checked the book, it was fine, and no action was required. So I'm assuming that someone's download was corrupted (maybe several people's) and that triggered a notice. But Amazon was reasonable in dealing with it.

Therefore, I suspect that if some customers did complain about nonstandard stylistic use of language (as is used by authors from Heinlein to Joyce) and that flagged the QC system, explaining that to Amazon would take care of it.

So overall, I think this is a good thing and (so far) Amazon seems to be being reasonable about it.

[[deleted user]]

More about this. One author I spoke with said that they could no longer offer their book free on amazon giveaways because of complaints of bad editing.

[Christina]

Previous comments deleted. Again, we are not here to pass judgment on others.

[G.G.]

Why are people so nervous about something that is simply normal? Any products that breaks too easily, or doesn't do what it's supposed to do gets removed eventually. So why should it be different for books?

As far as I'm concerned, I haven't heard of many books that received that treatment so why start to panic because it's mentioned?

[Dwayne, Head of Lettuce]

Comment deleted for negativity. We are not here to point out mistakes other authors make and call them "unforgivable".

[Pam]

Would be nice if the rules applies at least to ebooks issued by trad publishers - I know there would be a lot of difficulties correcting mistakes in paper copies, given how trad publishing works.

Having said that, had a real problem this week with a trad pub'd paperback (years old, so not anything to do with lowered standards) where several pages were printed in the wrong places. The book numbering was continuous, just the book suddenly didn't make sense, I had to hunt for the next page and then had the same problem for a section of about 10 to 12 pages before it then went back to normal. Not what you want when trying to follow a story!

[Christina]

Locking this thread because we have had to delete far too many comments that violate the group rules.