Amazon "Suppresses" Book With Too Many Hyphens 292
An anonymous reader writes Author Graeme Reynolds found his novel withdrawn from Amazon because of excessive use of hyphens.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.'"
from the what-until-they-get-a-load-of-this dept. (Score:5, Funny)
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The only way Slashdot would publish a book is if Bennett Haselton wrote it.
Re:from the what-until-they-get-a-load-of-this dep (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:from the what-until-they-get-a-load-of-this dep (Score:5, Informative)
Re:from the what-until-they-get-a-load-of-this dep (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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That's what I meant. Posting too early in the morning...
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Do tourists not eat alligators? Don't they sell it in restaurants.
I know they didn't have it on the menu at Disney.
Re:from the what-until-they-get-a-load-of-this dep (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:from the what-until-they-get-a-load-of-this dep (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:from the what-until-they-get-a-load-of-this dep (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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I thought, they preferred, commas, that have, no logical reason, to be, there.
Re:from the what-until-they-get-a-load-of-this dep (Score:5, Funny)
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I imagine #they'd totally $freak at a @book about &perl.
Or even better, APL [wikipedia.org].
Or Brainfuck, [wikipedia.org] more politely known as B****fuck.
Re:from the what-until-they-get-a-load-of-this dep (Score:4, Funny)
It probably has a better chance than my book: Whitespace by example [wikipedia.org]
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thats-too-expensive-let-the-cusomers-proof-read-it.
Although, if amazon are taking in 30% of the sales, they do need to proof-read, since traditional publishers have been doing that for centuries.
Re:from the what-until-they-get-a-load-of-this dep (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:from the what-until-they-get-a-load-of-this dep (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: from the what-until-they-get-a-load-of-this de (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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 (Score:3, Funny)
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
LOL ... w00t? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:LOL ... w00t? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:LOL ... w00t? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:LOL ... w00t? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Ah. What's news then, is that Amazon can't deploy a simple perl script to fix common typography errors such as these. YouTube wants more content creators so it deploys helpers like 'auto-stabilize' and such. Amazon, in contrast, prefers to castigate its contributors for typography errors. Who benefits? Copy
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Re:LOL ... w00t? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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What's news then, is that Amazon can't deploy a simple perl script to fix common typography errors such as these.
There is nothing simple about typography, and a script such as you describe would cause more damage than it would fix. Any editor has to fully understand English, to know which word is the right choice, to understand syntax and grammar, and to know when a writer is deliberately or playfully bending the rules.
If you want to see what the state of the art in automated editing looks like, try using Word's grammar checker. If all of its advice is followed, it can make any interesting story read as blandly as an
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There is nothing simple about typography, and a script such as you describe would cause more damage than it would fix.
In this case, the script would be simple, since the book isn't about math. Replace all U+2212 characters with U+002D and you've fixed the problem that Amazon has with the book.
Although U+2010 is called "Hyphen" and U+002D is called "Hyphen-Minus", either works in this case, with U+002D the most common.
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Please don't encourage Amazon to do that. Deciding whether a particular editorial choice is correct or not programmatically is a lot more complex than deciding whether video is likely to be unstable, and programmatically fixing those mistakes correctly in a pile of inconsistent, semi-random text and markup is dramatically harder than applying an IS algorithm to video.
In my experience, when
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It turns out the author used the minus sign instead of the hyphen [wordpress.com].
Hint: probably 99% of all ebooks on Amazon use a minus sign instead of a hyphen, because the hyphen doesn't exist on most (all?) keyboards.
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Re:LOL ... w00t? (Score:5, Informative)
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" [wordpress.com]
Re:LOL ... w00t? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:LOL ... w00t? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Hyphen.
As well:
— is an em-dash
– is an en-dash
is a minus, which you cannot see in Slashdot...
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Gonna piss off the typography police here, but...
Yes. They mean the same damned thing, and don't give me any crap about one looking a little longer than the other. A hyphen is a dash is a minus sign is any mid-height horizontal line.
Readability scores? Seriously? I will damned well use whatever character comes out when I press the key between "0" and "=" on my keyboard, and to hell with your broken automated readers that can't dea
Re:LOL ... w00t? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:LOL ... w00t? (Score:4, Informative)
An en-dash is much longer [noupe.com] than a hyphen.
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Apparently there's hyphen, en-dash, and em-dash and the text of the book does indeed use the en-dash...and looks a little weird.
There's actually a lot more [wikipedia.org] than just those, some of which render identically in most fonts.
I ran into a eBook that uses the n-dash correctly when used a a modifier for compound words, and it does look weird (which is what alerted me to it in the first place), but after reading the rules, I left them that way.
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In his blog, there are a number of comments about the HTML entity he used instead of the hyphen character. There is speculation that text-to-speech accessibility features were mis-interpreting things as a result.
On the TTS note, It seems like HTML (or at least the dialect used for ebooks, but why not everywhere?) should have a tag for providing pronunciation overrides, which would improve accessibility and finally allow us to know how the authors intended the pronunciation of all those apostrophe'd names.
Re:Why hyphenation in an e-text? (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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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!
What's unicode in ASCII?
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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....
IMO, the best you can do is trust the reader's automatic hyphenation and hope for the best. To do so, in your stylesheet, add:
hyphe
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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/selec
If readability was a crime... (Score:5, Funny)
...there would be no Slashdot summaries.
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Link to the source (Score:5, Informative)
At least link to the actual story, rather than the discussion of the story.
Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation. [wordpress.com]
Jeez. That was in the second paragraph of TFA.
Re:Link to the source (Score:5, Informative)
"UPDATE: The book is now back on sale. Common sense seems to have prevailed "
huh? (Score:2)
About time Amazon cracked down on this (Score:5, Funny)
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Welcome to what happens.... (Score:4, Insightful)
When you host your content on someone else's systems.
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Re:Welcome to what happens.... (Score:4, Funny)
My foot, your ass. See how that works? - Red Forman
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Welcome to what happens when you host your content on someone else's systems.
Amazon isn't your host.
It's your printer and publisher --- and both have always had a say in grammar, style and formatting.
The subscription service, Kindle Unlimited, has taken a lot of flack because these mostly self-published (aka vanity press) books have been edited so sloppily they wouldn't pass muster with your high school English teacher.
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Uh, no. Amazon isn't a printer or publisher in any meaningful sense of the word. Many eBooks distributed by Amazon have an actual publisher associated with them, and for their print editions, have an actual printer, too. Amazon is more properly described as a distributor and a bookseller. Traditionally, neither has had any say in grammar, style, or formatting; their sole recourse i
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Can't we have something like "net-neutrality" for e-readers and video viewers?
I mean, it is kind of the same principle.
Only Kindle store and DRM-free books (Score:2)
The Kindle can load its ebooks from anywhere.
In that case, the market dynamic is more like Android, or like music on the iPod prior to iTunes Plus: supporting only one digital restrictions management platform as well as DRM-free works from anywhere.
A lot of authors choose to use digital restrictions management so that they can sell more than one copy without having it be leaked to a mass infringement ring through an untraceable, judgment-proof member. The owner of an iPod can install DRM-free MP3 or M4A files from anywhere. But for nearly a decade aft
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I can load any damn PDF file I want on my Kindle, but I can't even change the images for the "screensaver". And no, it's not the cheaper-Kindle-but-you-get-ads model.
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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
Once every page and a half... (Score:2)
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They might mean over 100 unique words...
Can I have some ... (Score:2)
of what Melania G (the Amazon/Kindle exec) is smoking -- it must be really good stuff!
It was probably the wrong kind of "hyphen" (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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Wow. The first reasonable response in this entire discussion.
What's next? (Score:3)
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And after that, I bet they'll require a title. The bastards must be stopped.
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Life doesn't happen in chapters — at least, not regular ones. Nor do movies. Homer didn't write in chapters. I can see what their purpose is in children's books ("I'll read to the end of the chapter, and then you must go to sleep") but I'm blessed if I know what function they serve in books for adults.
-- Terry Pratchett
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Chapter breaks allow for a reader to be able to step away from the novel knowing they haven't left a cliffhanger on the next page. Think of it like a scene change in a movie. I can't stand just picking some random place to stop reading a book because I have to go. If I decide to quit reading in the middle of a chapter, I check to see how much is left. If it is just a page or two more, I'll finish the chapter.
Paragraph breaks let my brain codify smaller chunks of data for parsing more efficien
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I really don't care either way, I was just throwing the quote out there.
However, I have to say that I have never had much of an issue reading a book without chapters. It's usually clear when there's a change of pace in the story. At most, you might have to scan the next line or so to confirm. If you have a long chapter anyway, there might be reasons you would find a stopping point before getting to the end. I guess I'd say that chapters don't really do any harm and some people like them but an author should
Imagine what they think of a Lisp text (Score:2)
Sorry, too many parens.
I recently bought a book from Amazon... (Score:3)
.
Maybe I should start hitting the Amazon reviews and flagging all the books whose grammar usage I find confusing.
Let's see, this book [amazon.com] uses strange and confusing Capitalization, making it difficult to read. Maybe Amazon should suppress it as well.
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"I bought this book of poetry in good faith based on recommendations. Has this 'e e cummings' never heard of capital letters? I demand a refund."
Oh-dear (Score:2)
I guess Burroughs, Céline and countless other authors need not apply.
Amazon was being dumb (Score:5, Informative)
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... [wordpress.com]
Could be worse. (Score:4, Funny)
Could have been a proctology book rejected for too many colons.
They still sell Heideger's being-in-time (Score:2)
That's not the whole story (Score:2)
Alogrithms (Score:2)
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Hurrah pour Robur-le-Conquérant ! s’écria une voix ironique.
Robur-le-Conqérant [ebooksgratuits.com] by Jules Verne has over 1000 hyphens.
Dammit! (Score:3)
There goes my book in morse code!
While we're on the subject... (Score:3)
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.
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Let me count the reasons.
Cormac McCarthy (Score:2)
Waiting for amazon to ban Blood Meridian for shitty interpunction.
it wasn't about text-to-speech (Score:3)
From Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation [wordpress.com]
<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>
Tigger warning! (Score:2)
What's next? Taking down Winnie the Pooh because there are too many bounces before Tigger [nocookie.net] pounces?
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If we always had to wait until the biggest problems are fixed before fixing the little ones, we would never fix anything.
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The guy cared enough to complain to Amazon, so it was a problem for him.
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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
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From what I understood, the problem was that the hyphens were not the proper character so while one guy complained it probably affected a lot of readers too, especially blind readers who use text-to-speech. What's an annoyance for us might turn into a book that's nearly impossible to read for them.
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"Too many" is not "wrong kind"
We should be able to articulate what we intended much better than was done here, especially those people criticizing literature and editing skills. If this was a formatting error (as was indicated) then that was the problem, the letter should have indicated it. And since it was a formatting problem, it was easy to fix, as was proven in this matter.
There was no need to remove the book, and a human (not an automated response) could (and should) have politely asked for a correctio
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Probably OVER 9000!!!
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Those 100 words are repeated over 65536 times so it broke Amazon's word-counter program.