If someone genuinely spent the time to help catch errors in my manuscripts, I'd be thrilled. Editors are expensive!

That the automated system as described can be abused is a real problem, and that needs to be addressed. But that is a separate issue from the generally bad state of what passes for final edits in many books nowadays. That the author in question can't be bothered to keep a current copy of their manuscript leaves me lukewarm on the issue.

She could be traveling for the holidays and away from her usual setup. Someone in the replies mentions having this happen to them while in rural Newfoundland for a funeral, equipped with only a cellphone and a spotty connection.

Either way, I bet many programmers would run into trouble if asked to drop everything and immediately spin back up a production-ready environment for a project they haven't touched in a year.

I think it's reasonable to assume that if a store discovers a serious product defect, they should be able to expect the producer to respond in a short period of time or pull the product for sale. If the product is not important and never gets fixed, it never goes on sale. If other things take priority, it's off sale for a while and comes back. If it's the most urgent thing in the producer's business, it gets fixed immediately and never lapses.

I would argue that the whole point of having a publisher is to avoid having to do this kind of thing yourself, but I know many authors forego publishers because publishers don't want to publish their stuff or they don't agree with the publisher's cut. Both reasonable objections.

It's sort of like if you own a restaurant. If someone dies in your family, and at the same time a health inspection gets failed, you have one of two options: Drop everything and coordinate passing the inspection; or deal with your family stuff first and lose income when your product is not selling in the mean time. The more employees and structure you have, the easiest it is to get away for a few days. The more it's a sole proprietorship, the more your fate is in your hands.

(FWIW I am from Newfoundland -- although I'm not an author -- and while the isolation of rural areas is not exaggerated in the comment, it's also not a surprise to people traveling there. When I travel home, which in the last few years has just been for funerals, I have a plan in place)

One author mentions that publishers don’t care enough to do anything about it, leaving the author once again the one punished.

It’s not as though this is a result of self-publishing.

A full book manuscript is tiny, and requires zero spinup whatsoever, unless you count opening a PDF or DOCX file as such. I have a copy of everything I've written over the past thirty years available immediately, and it would fit on a $4 thumb drive. If my career depended on it, I would be quite certain to have it with me at all times.

> A full book manuscript is tiny, and requires zero spinup whatsoever, unless you count opening a PDF or DOCX file as such.

That is not uncommon, but neither is it the quantitative norm. A lot of authors are particular about the typesetting of their documents, and it does require a rendering environment.

It isn't unusual for a half-LaTeX half-something-else monstrosity to be rendered in a semi-custom environment. Especially if you're dealing with anything academic.

In those kinds of environments you may have a ton of assets, like graphs, that may either be large file-sizes, and/or re-generated during the rendering process from various large datasets. Those assets are not small, and may prevent you holding much more than a couple books on your $4 thumb drive.

If you have to use an academic, LaTeX monstrosity as an example to even somewhat limit the number of books you can store for a few dollars, surely we can just agree that the cost of storage is inconsequential compared to what an author will produce over their career output?

Perhaps. But months and years down the line, recreating an environment to regenerate the book can take considerable effort.

I have a book that is generated from a sqlite database, and is dependent on a certain version range of Scribus and Lilypond. It would take me days to get a setup that would work for me to make changes to it, but it saved me years of work in the initial edition.

That's not exactly typical, to be fair.

It gets worse. There was Python, elisp, Lilypond . . . it was a whole thing. But what I describe above is just what it would take to make changes now.

And what if you _didn’t know_ your “career depended on it?” What then?

Does “readily available” equate to “on your person at all times?” I’m sure the greats all did so before flash drives of sufficient capacity were available, right?

Should a professional accountant keep copies of all the tax returns they prepared, on a flash drive that’s with them at all times, in case a client gets audited? Should I keep a copy of every line of code I ever wrote? Where does this professional responsibility end for you?

I've written and published myself. Keeping manuscripts handy is part of the job. The problems mentioned in the twitter thread didn't exist before digital distribution, so what authors did beforehand is a bit of a non-sequitur. There were fewer of them, and the ones that made a living by it had real support on the business side of things, something vanishingly rare nowadays.

Accountants are required by law to maintain a minimum of seven years' worth of records for exactly that reason.

Fundamentally, if you want to sell a book you've written, no one is going to care more than you. That means that if you're a small, unsupported author (the vast majority of cases), it's on you to take care of the annoyances that come along for the ride. That's the nature of work. That flagging can be used as a form or harassment is a genuine problem- this is an inevitable side-effect of systems designed for pure automation, without a human in the loop to provide feedback. Over-reliance on automation is an issue that goes far beyond the world of publishing. That is orthogonal to the issue of being responsible for one's own creation, in terms of having needed resources on-hand.

Would you have your portfolio on your person at all times? Probably not, but you wouldn't go on a long trip without it. If you were actively working you'd have it available. If you didn't have it, you'd accept the risk of losing a contract or having your work temporarily withdrawn from sale. Maybe a bookseller would notice typos in your current edition and takes your book off the shelves until you can make a revised edition.

I mean, fundamentally, if you're saying your book needs to be on sale 24/7/365 then you need to be standing behind it 24/7/365 or paying a person or organisation to do that for you. If you want to take a break from the business of your book you should be prepared for Amazon to do the same.

> That the author in question can't be bothered to keep a current copy of their manuscript ...

Why should the author, rather than the publisher, be expected to produce a public-upload-ready file on demand? (If the deadlines other authors are reporting in the thread are accurate, I wouldn't even reasonably expect a full-time major publisher to hit them - and during the last week of the year?!)

In this case, the author is the publisher.

(Well, technically Amazon is the publisher, but in Amazon's lexicon it's self-published.)

The author might be managing the Amazon account, and I don't see the specific book mentioned so I can't check if Amazon says it's Red Wombat or something else, but she mentions getting the file back from Argyll (https://argyllproductions.com/) at one point. I'm pretty sure they are the actual publisher in the sense of preparing the final file, regardless of what Amazon thinks.

Argyll, Smashwords, and their ilk are self-publishing platforms. Think fanfic and the like. The author is ultimately responsible for everything. The publishers offer services in the $10-$50 range for style-setting an entire book, and you get what you pay for.

Example: https://www.smashwords.com/list

Unless there's something I'm missing, Argyll is a small press. Smashwords is more like a vanity press, which is what you describe. There's a huge difference between those two kinds of publishers, even if both give authors more responsibility than a traditional publisher.

"Self-publishing" is really orthogonal to both of those, though today most people would probably describe any vanity press as effectively self-published.

now, if the author would use pandoc he'd get that for free and noone had to do the menial work.

I’ve bought several of the authors published and self published ebooks, and they’re all generally done to a professional standard. I know that she uses freelance copy editors for the self published stuff.

In this case, (further down the thread) it was a dialect thing, so the whole problem was a false positive from an over zealous automated system on Christmas Eve, in prime panic ebook gifting time.

well, it was not about the case, but about the thriving service sector in GPs-link, where people are offering the service of formatting word-files for e-book export. Considering that self-publishing is probably in the 20$-wage-range, the authors could easily learn pandoc+git (or just use MS Word the right way), save that money for subsequent books AND (which is the most important thing) should have a workflow in place, where they actually can check for previous version/can edit the published version easily.

God forbid somebody with non-technical interests wants to write a book without first learning a bunch of nerd shit.

The majority of authors today don't know that software named pandoc exists, let alone what it does, let alone what it might do for them.

"But I don’t want to go among nerds,” HN user catalogia remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all nerds here. I’m a nerd. You’re a nerd.” “How do you know I’m a nerd?” said they. “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Don't get me wrong, I like and use pandoc. But it's not the sort of tool anybody should expect the average author to be aware of. Maybe if it had a GUI it'd be more reasonable to expect the general public to use it.

well, it's text-editor based and scores of people worked with similar systems successfully without being a nerd before Microsoft and IBM started to push for WYSIWIG because you could sell a new UI for that every year or two (and now the same people are selling SaaS because people stopped taking the bait...). Efficiency gains for actual users: noone knows, but people are making a lot of money, so it has to be something.

The problem is not you the reporter. The problem is the automated Amazon system that processes your report and the obviously fucked up way it operates.

It is abuseable as all hell as demonstrated in the replies to the tweet. Even when not being used to make people's life miserable it is a failure of a system.

Amazon lets potential clients know of problems with the merchandise, what a terrible system indeed!

The problematic part isn’t that they’re notified—that’s the expected behavior. The problem is that the book is pulled automatically without waiting for the author to respond. That wouldn’t be so bad if there were a lot of valid issues, but anyone can get a book pulled maliciously just by reporting a bunch of “mistakes”—which, as was demonstrated here, need not be actual mistakes.

Pulling a book because of a typo is also a unreasonable overreaction. It would be better without typos, but I'd still rather read a book with a typo than not having the book at all. This is even more of an overreaction than it would be to pull software that has any bugs whatsoever.

Edit: typos

> ... I'd still rather read a book with a typo than not having the book at all.

For technical education material (both mechanical engineering and optics recently for me), I definitely don't buy books where the comments indicate a lot of typos.

It's a real PITA to be working through practise exercises, and come up with a different result than the expected answer. Then not know if it's me, or the book author who got it wrong. :(

For fiction books though, an occasional typo is not a stress.

According to tweets they get at least 5 days. I wouldnt be surprised if Amazon is prescreening user generated reports wits some basic NLP checker to filter out trolls/missclicks.

Considering how bad Amazon is at screening fake reviews, I actually would be surprised.

Authors could also use an automated system that processes these complaints, applies them unilaterally to the manuscript (false positive non-typos be damned) and uploads a modified version.

Right on empowering random Amazon users to edit one's book with no oversight. The customer always knows best.

It doesn't really matter. Amazon is happy, the customer is happy, sales are coming in, and when the book finally does not make any sense whatsoever, the original version can be uploaded.

That seems even more abuse-prone.

Yes. I still don't understand why Wikipedia doesn't fall apart. But pretty sure it doesn't.

Only because there are a number of people who monitor all the pages. It couldn’t (currently) be done with an automated setup, as shown by the legion of bots that monitor as well and still don’t do a perfect job.

My reading of the tweets was that whomever was flagging the "typos" wasn't flagging actual typos, rather, that they were flagging words intentionally spelled the way they were to convey some regional dialect. Sometimes, things are spelled in a certain manner that is non-standard to convey an accent or mannerism of a character in a fictional work.

> "It’s super not helpful, particularly when the issue is vernacular English."

> THAT WASN'T EVEN A TYPO, PERSON, YOU GOT CONFUSED ABOUT THE SPEAKER

It would have been nice if the tweet poster would have made this abundantly clear, but alas. But a "typo" to me implies a mistake, and it's not clear to me if the flagger is flagging mistakes, or something that was intentional for the purposes of storytelling.

>The problem is the automated Amazon system that processes your report and the obviously fucked up way it operates.

There should be a button available to authors and publishers that says "i dispute these flags" and when the button is pushed, the flags are put into a temporary status and the reviewer's/submitter's real name and address is provided to the author so the author can take them to court for damages. If the flagged items are just low quality then the author would lose in court and the submitted flagged items could then be assessed against the work. If the flagged items are not legitimate, then the person who submitted the bad reports can write a nice check to the author and amazon can then drop the bad reports from their system. The idea that everything can, or should, be handled within a platform (facebook, twitter, amazon, apple, google, etc.) is idiotic. There is a legal system for a reason and it's so that we can get a consistent and fair adjudication of our disputes.

So if I mark that there are 3 commas in a row and a word is clearly wrong due to OCR errors the author can press a button AND GET MY ADDRESS?

Yeah, no chance of abuse there.

> Yeah, no chance of abuse there.

The author having to file a lawsuit against you is a much higher hurdle to get over than an anti-fan falsely flagging the authors work and costing them money. The common idea that people should be able to do anything they want without consequences and with a huge corporation -- who doesn't know them from Bob -- having to provide them with cover is childish.

Does it really need to be pointed out that a name and address enable far more than a lawsuit?

I think Amazon should add a threshold and always have a human check the reported issues before setting up this flags that can do damage to the author. But if you look at youtube example the big companies don't care about the little guys.

Thats basically the function of an editor. That’s not a function that lends itself well to automated, hands-off processes.

So they’d have to back to charging some amount of money, which leads us back to square one.

Big guy, little guy doesn’t matter in this case. An editor costs money and either Big Name Publisher can eat the cost or No Name Author, but it doesn’t benefit Amazon much to eat it.

Yes, but in this cases you have users or algorithms to find potential problems and a human will check should be more economic that having an editor reading the entire book or watching the full video. Related to youtube is weird they do not have a trust system for channels with a larger reputation have a human double check the algorithm , it would at least reduce the bad publicity when you accuse a channel with many subscribers of ridiculous things that were not in the video.

You are comparing apples and hand grenades here. Major publishers have a budget--but they also have account managers with Amazon who contact them if something goes sideways. This is somebody, whether intentionally or not, kicking an indie (she's got one publication through Simon and Schuster, the rest are Amazon self-publications) writer in the shins.

This is Amazon kicking an indie writer in the shins after noticing that the book had a pull request.

Indie writer isn't exactly right, she's a successful children's book author under her real name, with at least a dozen books out from Puffin. (Also a Hugo award winning comic book creator, but that was self-published.)

But yes, writing for adults as T. Kingfisher she's mostly self-published, and that was the case with the book in question, I believe.

No, but I think the tweeter is making the point that there should be a distinction between actual typos and slang/vernacular. Apparently, there isn't a distinction and his typo rate is thus artificially higher than it should be. Seems like a valid point to me -- there needs to be a distinction or at least some automated checking to ignore reports for informal words...

Also, what about books of the like of "A Clockwork Orange" or "1984", where the author defines their own vernacular? If you'd run either by a standard spelling/grammar checker such as those included with Word, both of the aforementioned books would be flagged, despite both being highly regarded classics.

Great point, that's something an automated checker wouldn't catch. Sounds like an opportunity for crowdsourcing. As a simple example, the interface could allow a user to report typos and view any other reported typos, then submit upvotes/downvotes on previously reported typos.

> It’s sad it can be used to grief, but as a user it’s -> a out <- the only method I have of pointing out the issues and asking for them to be addressed

Ironic typo?

I know right? They forgot the '.' between 'a' and 'out'.

Wait... What am I supposed to be parsing for again?

iOS typos. I try to edit for them but seem to have missed that one.

I bet you'd be upset if your comments were all taken offline until you resolved that.

Yes, as an author, part of your job is to proofread your work. If this author published the work before it was actually ready, than I have zero sympathy for the author respective of the comments - next time publish quality work rather than blaming the readers. And yes, I know how hard it is to edit a publication, knowing several published writers - all of whom understand that editing is time consuming and much work, but simply part of the process in turning quality work.

Firstly the author isn't blaming readers, they're blaming Amazon. Secondly, if a typo is found in your work would you expect it to immediately be pulled from sale? What if there was no typo at all and the reader was mistaken? Is it fair to pull it from sale until the non-mistake is "resolved"? Can you not see how this is open to abuse?

Sure, but again - it's the same argument - the author should have taken enough pride in the manuscript to produce quality work to begin with. That's the root cause that put the author in this position.

In this case, the work was quality and the reader was wrong. But there’s no way for the author to respond with that.

yeah, hurting sales is the best way to make the author accountable, where did vote with your wallet went here?

he can at any time publish a revision and be done with it

> he can at any time publish a revision and be done with it

How can you revise things that aren’t mistakes?

funny you say that because revising is exactly what he did, so somehow he managed to get off his horse and push the uncommon vernacular out of the text

are we better for it? probably not, but then again he's not forced to publish it into the low cost mass market, and knowing what the audience wants is basically his job description so...

>push the uncommon vernacular out of the text

You're entirely comfortable with only being able to publish the lowest common denominator of things which will be comprehensible to everyone, at the risk of being automatically pulled from publication if an author steps too far from a style that's perfectly clear to the reader?

never said that. what I said is that Amazon is mass market quality and know thy audience. if one wants to pursue artistry it's fine, but it's a different set of rules with a different product marketability

> get off his horse and push the uncommon vernacular out of the text

Is using slang pretentious now?

no, but believing one own English to be universal and above scrutiny most definitely is

It’s not above scrutiny, but it’s his choice to use it and it isn’t a definitively incorrect choice.

A typo is not that. A typo is when one mistakenly spells something incorrectly, or incorrectly adds or removes a word to make sentence ungrammatical.

If it was intentional, then it’s author fiat. You don’t have to like it, but that’s no excuse for removing a book from a store.

To note, if Amazon themselves say they have an issue with his language, that’s their prerogative, but right now it just looks like abuse of their reporting system.

as an aside I honestly doubt Amazon acted on a single word being flagged, because that level of scrutiny would be hurting its bottom line, but we only have one side of the story so we have to act upon that alone, still.

anyway, that's the difference between authorship and artistry, the fact that he caved show which side he's on. Amazon only obligation is with their customers and he's free to pursue less mainstream options if he wants uncompromised freedom

You:

> so somehow he managed to get off his horse

Also you:

> that's the difference between authorship and artistry, the fact that he caved show which side he's on

and? there are no laws that forbid grandstanding and loving money. Moreover those are his actions, the contradiction, or better yet hypocrisy, is on him. of course a description of the events would and should contain more of the same, since he's all barks but no bites to his feeding hand.