Speaking of Kobo, Diane Duane posted another note on her blog about the Canadian Young Wizards situation (which we previously mentioned here). Nathan Maharaj, Kobo’s Merchandising Manager, saw her earlier blog and contacted her publisher to find out about the Canadian rights for the Young Wizards novels. Upon learning they did have the rights, Kobo immediately made them available in its Canadian store.

Links follow, for the benefit of Canadian readers:

  1. So You Want To Be A Wizard (eISBN 9780547545110)
  2. Deep Wizardry(eISBN 9780547538662)
  3. High Wizardry (eISBN 9780547540306)
  4. A Wizard Abroad (eISBN 9780547546797)
  5. The Wizard’s Dilemma (eISBN 9780547546827)
  6. A Wizard Alone (eISBN 9780547546803)
  7. Wizard’s Holiday (eISBN  9780547546834)
  8. Wizards at War (eISBN  9780547546810)
  9. A Wizard of Mars (eISBN 9780547487953)

While this may not help those specifically tied to Amazon or Nook readers, readers who are able to make use of Kobo files now have a new Canadian option. Kudos to Kobo for being so quick off the mark!

Duane also responded to a question that has been raised about the matter of whether the OCR-induced errors in the e-books had or would be fixed. Reminding readers that the e-book vendors are actually forbidden from changing the content of e-books, even to fix typos, she explains that people who complain to her about them are barking up the wrong tree:

Seriously — and it seems I have to keep saying this, since there are a surprising number of people who’ve been writing me in a “tone of voice” that suggests they expect me to fix these problems personally — my influence in these matters is minimal. Maybe that’s annoying, but it’s the way things are. While I personally supervise the quality of ebooks that come out of Badfort Press and Errantry Press, I have no direct quality control over ebooks produced inside Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. As consumers, if you find that the presentation of the product you’re being sold falls below your expectations of quality, you need to be contacting the publisher yourselves and making your opinions known. If enough people do this, there’s a chance of something happening.

I expect Duane has made her opinions known as well, but as she points out, there are limits to how much influence authors have on publishers. At least she was able to fix the errors for the “Author’s Cut” versions of the first four books she will be releasing herself in the next few months.

8 COMMENTS

  1. And so a big part of the reason for the low-to-nonexistent quality control on many e-books from the Big Six – the people who are visible to the buyer (the author and the retailer/agent) have no authority or ability to fix things; the people who do have that authority are effectively invisible and nicely shielded from having to deal with irate customers.

  2. “you need to be contacting the publisher yourselves and making your opinions known.”

    It would be nice if when an author says this they would provide their fans with a better contact than the CS links you get through the corporate website. I’ve contacted publishers many times over the past couple years about errors and the one time something really got done was when I dug up the email address for the Executive Editor for the label.

  3. Yeah. I have to admit, I am disappointed with this response. When she wanted to sell the books to us, she had no problems agitating to the publisher on our behalf. Now, all of a sudden, it’s OUR job to make sure we’re not getting a product she knew was defective before she started to sell it to us? Hell, no. And if she equates ‘inquiring as to whether we are to be ripped off’ with ‘having a tone of voice’ then maybe she’s not as customer service savvy as I thought. Either way, I am passing on these books, even though they interested me. If she cannot campaign for the quality of her own product, then *I* certainly am not going to take it up as a cause.

  4. Hi Chris,
    Thanks for posting this.

    If I can just make a small correction: I’m Kobo’s *Merchandising* Manager (which is roughly analogous to being a buying & assortment manager/big cheese/kahuna for a bricks & mortar bookstore chain). We have marketing people who do great work, but I am not their manager.

    Cheers!

  5. Nathan: Whoops, looks like my Freudian slipped. Fixed it. Thanks.

    Joanna: What makes you think she hasn’t? As I noted in the article, I have little doubt she has made her displeasure known to the publisher. I know for a fact she’s rather upset about it. What makes you think she wouldn’t let them know she’s upset?

    But there’s a difference in publisher willingness to make e-books available for sale in a new market (which doesn’t cost them anything, since the e-books already exist) and pay someone’s salary to proofread backlist titles (which costs them money that they may not think the books will make them back). I can very easily see the publisher shrugging authorial demands off with a “When we get around to it.” Authors aren’t all-powerful. If they were, they wouldn’t need to go off and self-publish things that the big publishers didn’t want.

    Even the egregious formatting errors in Lord of the Rings were only fixed after a large consumer outcry—and considering what a control freak Christopher Tolkien is about his father’s work, if he couldn’t manage it without people having to get upset first, what chance would Diane have with a not-so-legendary series? I certainly find it hard to blame her for coming off a little annoyed about being caught between an apathetic publisher on the one hand and fans who blame her personally on the other.

  6. What makes me think she hasn’t is, she pretty much said outright that this is our job, not hers. I have no doubt that she herself has limited power in this area, but she has more power than *I* do because she at least knows the names and contact information of some people in charge and I don’t. And further, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask, upon release into a new market, if known errors from the prior release have been fixed. It was not an unreasonable question. And I think she responded very rudely to it. Regardless of whether she has ‘power’ over this or not, she is the public face of this product and I think she could have handled this better. I might have bought the books, but if the author herself cannot vouch that they are error-free, no thank you. And if she’s going to tell me that it’s MY job to police that, double no thank you. She handled this badly.

    • There’s only so much an author can do without turning into a nuisance, which would then be counterproductive to the cause. From what Diane has said she’s done in her discussion with you over on that original post, it seems like she’s essentially reached that point. That means further agitating for change is the readers’ job. The readers pay the publishers’ salaries in a more direct sense than the author can be said to, after all.

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