{"id":9029,"date":"2012-02-07T12:39:36","date_gmt":"2012-02-07T19:39:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=9029"},"modified":"2012-02-08T08:00:08","modified_gmt":"2012-02-08T15:00:08","slug":"an-editor-an-editor-my-kingdom-for-an-editor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=9029","title":{"rendered":"An Editor, an Editor, My Kingdom for an Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"

I finished my first real ebook yesterday.\u00a0 Wait a minute, I hear you saying, you’ve been using an electronic reader for more than a year now and must have read a lot of ebooks.\u00a0 True, but this time I’m talking about a dedicated ebook, published through Amazon and offered as a $2.99 Kindle download.\u00a0 The book doesn’t have an ISBN number, just a catalog number assigned by Amazon, and you won’t find it on any bookstore or library shelf.\u00a0 Oh, you can get a paper copy if you’re willing to pay almost $20<\/span> … it’s called print on demand.\u00a0 I suppose the day will come when certain books will be available in electronic form only and you can’t even get print on demand, but for now, the novel I just finished is as close to a pure ebook as it is possible to be.<\/p>\n

When Amazon and B&N started selling ebooks, what you got was a scanned version of the original print book.\u00a0 Customers quickly began complaining about poor editing … too often, books converted into electronic format were filled with formatting and pagination errors.\u00a0 Booksellers and publishers took their time responding, but eventually came to realize that customers expect ebooks to be as error-free as print books.\u00a0 Just recently, so many customers complained about errors in the Kindle version of Neal Stephenson’s new novel Reamde<\/em> that Amazon recalled and replaced copies<\/a> after the publisher made belated corrections.<\/p>\n

Sadly, this is unlikely to happen with dedicated ebooks.\u00a0 It certainly didn’t happen with the one I just read.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Okay, it wasn't this bad (click to enlarge)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The most common errors in my ebook come from the scanning and conversion process.\u00a0 Words that in the print version are split and hyphenated at the right margin retain the hyphens in the electronic version, even though they now appear elsewhere on the page.\u00a0 More galling were the typos and mistakes that would have been edited out in the normal publishing process.\u00a0 This book, alas, apparently went straight from the author to Amazon and then on to customers.<\/p>\n

It’s a damn shame.\u00a0 If, like me, you mentally stop and regroup every time you come to a formatting glitch, error, or typo, you’re not going to enjoy reading the book.<\/p>\n

I guess the new rule, at least for authors who self-publish through Amazon, is to ask other writers to read and edit your manuscript before you send it in, because no one at Amazon is going to do it for you.<\/p>\n

My new rule?\u00a0 At least for now, no more $2.99 ebooks.\u00a0 I read for pleasure, and don’t need the aggravation.<\/p>\n

——————–<\/p>\n

Here’s an ever-so-slightly related footnote: clearly, if Lieutenant Colonel Davis<\/a> had asked anyone in his chain of command to edit his paper, it would have come out saying something entirely different.<\/p>\n

So perhaps it’s good he bucked the system, because no one in power is willing to speak the truth about Afghanistan.\u00a0 Sorry about your career, dude, but you did the right thing.\u00a0 We all know you’re going to be retiring soon; I just hope they don’t do to you what they did to Scott Ritter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

——————–<\/p>\n

Update (2\/8\/12):<\/em><\/strong><\/span> A friend who recently published a Kindle\/print on demand book left a comment (see below) pointing out that the POD version is just $7.99 from Amazon.\u00a0 That is true and I apologize for my error.\u00a0 The POD version sold by B&N, however, lists for $19.18 … quite a markup!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I finished my first real ebook yesterday.\u00a0 Wait a minute, I hear you saying, you’ve been using an electronic reader for more than a year now and must have read a lot of ebooks.\u00a0 True, but this time I’m talking about a dedicated ebook, published through Amazon and offered as a $2.99 Kindle download.\u00a0 The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[412,18,30,21],"tags":[285,118,571,573,119,73,572],"class_list":["post-9029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews","category-consumerism","category-reviews","category-words","tag-amazon","tag-barnes-noble","tag-ebooks","tag-editing","tag-kindle","tag-nook","tag-print-on-demand"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9029"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9049,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9029\/revisions\/9049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}