those complaints about bad editing?

[walkitout]

http://americaneditor.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/hall-of-shame-an-introduction/

Here's a sample.

The guy decided to pick on a book that costs all of $5.99 at Fictionwise. It was initially published in, as near as I can tell, 1977 and the author is long since dead. The publisher was _always_ tiny. And the examples included in why this belongs in the Hall of Shame strike me as either not valid, inadequately supported by direct evidence or too minor to care.

I find myself filled with revulsion and disgust, especially since so many people piled on to agree. Seriously? You're _this mad_ about a $5.99 ebook?

It took a while to track down the publisher's web presence. I think this is it.

http://liveoakhouse.info/Page%205%20fantasies.htm

Oh, and I should mention how I wound up at Rich Adin's site:

Someone claimed the kindle would be coming in a color LCD touch screen format. In the course of investigating this claim, google found me:

http://www.teleread.org/2010/02/08/coming-soon-to-the-kindle-color-wi-fi-more-applications/

Chris Meadows says:

"I would be inclined to suggest that Amazon should first concentrate on improving how they put e-books on the device as-is until they get it right. If you have trouble walking, you shouldn’t be trying to run a marathon."

This brought me to:

http://www.teleread.org/2010/02/08/rich-adin-starts-ebook-hall-of-shame/

Paul Biba says:

Rich Adin has started his Hall of Shame, to highlight the poor state of editing of so many ebooks.

Which brought me to americaneditor at wordpress.

To sum up: Meadows thinks that rather than bring out new and different e-readers for the masses, Amazon should focus on improving the ebook (bought from a competitor and NOT SOLD IN THE KINDLE STORE) formatting of a tiny publication from 1977 by a tiny little press that requires significant effort to find their web presence.

Oh, and the only way that Adin will be happy is if the publisher then brings the corrections to his attention.

If you're going to complain about bad editing in an ebook, you'd better come up with a better example than his, particularly since as near as I can tell, Adin doesn't know you can refer to your father as "Paw".

Irrelevance piled upon stupidity added to hypocrisy does not a convincing argument make.

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I should preface this by saying that I know both Rich Adin and Simon Cauchi from an editing listserv (Simon being the one who asked what was wrong with Paw -- I think it wasn't the spelling of Paw that was the issue at all), as well as a couple of other commenters. I don't think Rich's focus is just on ebooks, either, though that's how others are spinning it (can you spin a focus? ne'mind).

Ironically, I think he messed up on quoting examples (he's got four problems and two examples, and the examples look to me to be in the wrong places -- I've now commented there to that effect).

The piling on is probably nothing to do with the particular example he gave, and everything to do with getting a chance to vent about errors in books (which naturally editors can go on all DAY about, not always sensibly).

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

There's a much more convincing story at http://delkytlar.livejournal.com/81497.html?thread=360025#t360025, where melina123 writes:

"Just so you know what I mean -- when I refer to problems I'm not talking about a few typos or little mistakes. I mean huge readability problems with the entire file. A few examples:

-- With the original omnibus Kindle release of Lord of the Rings, every time an accented character was used (not uncommon in LotR!) the next 19 or so characters were missing, and parts of sentences were also documented as missing. You can find some reports of these problems here. These problems were mostly, eventually fixed, but it took a long time and a lot of customer hassle, and I believe it only happened because of the fact that it's an important title.

-- In the most recent Harry Dresden book, Turn Coat, the Kindle edition had multiple blank lines between each paragraph and some instances of repeated sentences at the beginning of chapters. ETA: Apparently this was eventually fixed. Phantoms by Dean Koontz had the same issue.

-- The ebook release of CS Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy -- all three books -- had the indentation of paragraphs reversed, so that the first line of each paragraph was flush left, with the rest of the paragraph indented. These books were eventually pulled, but still haven't been rereleased. (How hard a fix could this be? I could do it in the HTML file in about five minutes.)

-- Many, many books are formatted so that the default opening of the book goes to chapter 1, rather than a prologue. Unless you look at the TOC (if there is one) or start at the cover and page through everything, you'd never know there is a prologue. This is so common I've stopped reporting it, but you'd think authors might be bothered that readers are missing part of their book.

I'm just pointing these out so that you know these aren't little typos or trivial issues -- they are huge problems with the ebook versions, and it's very, very hard to get anyone to listen. I guarantee you that if a print version had 8 lines of blank space between each paragraph or the indenting reversed, someone would notice before consumers ever saw it. It's clear that nobody is looking at these ebooks on a Kindle or an emulator. Even though you are saying that Amazon is doing the conversions, the boilerplate response when you report this to them is that it's up to the publisher to make a fix (and Harper Collins said as much with respect to LotR)."

I read _Turn Coat_ on the kindle

[walkitout]

It came out at the beginning of April. I bought it on the kindle in the middle of April. I reviewed it by the end of April. I did not note excessive badness in my version, so "eventually" may be pushing it. I do frequently notice problems -- I'm not saying there aren't any. But I see them in _every single book I've ever read_ (okay, maybe not Bibles -- those things are really carefully checked over and I've never personally spotted a typo or similar error in a Bible). Most recent egregious word screwup was in Ely's _Railroads and American Law_ -- he used intimidate when he meant intimate (did I spell that right? Yup. Weird. I mean the verb meaning communicate, not the adjective meaning close to). (FWIW, precatory turned out to be a real word.) I've had books which were missing a signature and had a duplicate of a different signature. I've had books in which signatures were present but out of order. Etc. I haven't seen a damn thing yet as bad as what has happened to me with physical books.

I _really_ noticed when automatic spellcheckers became prevalent, because the typos were almost all gone, and the word-o's had skyrocketed. So to speak.

For the first year or so that Amazon existed as a company, they had essentially no mechanism for making persistent corrections to data errors in their catalog (author name spelled wrong type of thing -- and worse). They got huge volumes of complaints (especially from those authors). It wasn't necessarily a particularly complicated thing to fix from a technical perspective, and each individual fix seems like a fairly small thing to do. However, even once tools had been created to make persistent fixes, we needed to have a specialized group of people who could make fixes that didn't make things worse -- and didn't "fix" things that weren't wrong, even if they looked really weird. Even they created problems, but they did a fantastic job of developing institutional knowledge about how to do what they were doing.

I know absolutely nothing about the kindle-izing process. However, I do know that typesetting systems at least used to use SGML languages to decorate the text, and I would expect there's a bunch of code out there that attempts to convert whatever the proprietary SGML type stuff is into whatever cruft Amazon has designed on top of a format that goes all the way back to Palm Notes. It is not clear to me whether it is publishing people or Amazon people doing the conversion, whether the conversion tools were produced by publishing people or by Amazon. Independent of that, it is not clear to me whether it is publishing people or Amazon people who would be responsible for _authorizing_ corrections to problems generated by the conversion. Further, corrections to problems generated by the conversion rightly should be made to the conversion program(s) soonest, and let the early adopters/readers suffer; anything else would become so labor-intensive that a price close to list probably would be justified.

One of the design issues with the system we used to correct errors in the catalog was how persistent to make corrections -- there was always a chance that at some point in the future, the data inbound would be more accurate and we might want to dump the fix we'd put in place because the stuff coming in was better than what we'd come up with. We built that into the design, along with a hammer to say, no, make it what we say it is, never mind what our data source says. Eventually, everything got the hammer. If it really is currently the publishers responsibility to authorize the changes as a matter of contract, but Amazon's responsibility to implement the changes as a matter of procedure, goddess only knows what's going on in practice. I know there can be contractual issues on making changes to the data about to be published, and there's always a chance that what we're seeing in terms of errors is a combination of technical problems, staffing issues and a contractual battle over who gets to make modifications to what.

googling Rich Adin

[walkitout]

http://www.freelance-editorial-services.com/staff.php

Looks like his firm, so one assumes this is accurate. As near as I can tell, there's only one person in the firm who has _ever_ edited fiction, and that person is definitively not Rich Adin. I'm not sure why Adin thinks his opinion about the use of a dialect spelling of Paw in dialog in a fantasy should matter to anyone but him. I definitely do not care. What I do know is from a professional standpoint, he's wrong. And from every other standpoint (tactics, logic, morality), picking on a work by a dead author from over a quarter century ago published by a tiny publisher makes him a jackass.

Bray away, jackasses. You'll just further marginalize your cause.