typosLuddites love to complain about typos in e-books, and over the years, Amazon’s self-published offerings have been among the worst offenders.

Amazon is responding. Here’s a QC-related guide for participants in Kindle Direct, covering not just typos but other issues.

English teacher Derek Haines, the author of the Just Publishing blog, recently heard from Amazon when readers reported problems. Hey, three known typos in a book almost 170,000 words long. Not bad. But here’s to a push for perfection by way of a spell check dictionary for newly submitted books, as well as continued opportunities for readers to report errors!

Related:  A recent post from Haines, critical of Kindle Direct and competitors—The Self Publishing Train Wreck Is Near—as well as TeleRead Editor Chris Meadows’s response.

4 COMMENTS

  1. “Luddites” – – pull the other one. Things have improved, but typos, along with incorrect formatting and ugly design remain the bane of ebooks. This is nothing more than a manifestation of the publishers’ desire to shovel ebooks out the door as cheaply as possible. Readers have every right to expect ebooks to be produced to the same high standard you’d expect from a physical copy.

  2. Haines kind of misses the boat again here—his proposed spellcheck on submission wouldn’t have caught the three typos Amazon reported to him, because they were all typos that created words that would have been found in the dictionary: “is” instead of “it,” “where” instead of “were,” etc.

    I do think it’s great that Amazon is taking the trouble to go after typos in self-pub e-books. I wonder, are they also informing publishers of typos in their e-books? Remember, typos in big publisher e-books were the biggest problem with e-books even before self-pub got big, and they continue to be. See my posts on the “Young Wizards” e-book typos, or the way that “shift” happens. Will Amazon talk back to them, too?

  3. I had printed books with typos, and how it irked me that I could not do anything about it, The book became always faulty, and of course you could not go to the bookstore to replace it because publishers didn’t reprint a corrected version that you could get to replace the previous version. Only time I got a replacement was if the book missed some pages or something similar.

    But with ebooks, you can report a typo/mistake to Amazon and in many cases, you get a corrected version to replace the faulty one. That’s one big advantage of e-books vs. p-books.

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