Ebooks and professionalism in the publishing industry: The Case of John Barth on Kindle. UPDATED

by Doctor Science

I see in the comments to the previous post that I really poked some nerves by saying "the profession of editing had become distinctly unprofessional." Perhaps I should have said, "people with pro editing jobs were no longer able to consistently edit in a professional manner." The root cause was succinctly stated by commenter Professor Fate, who says ze worked in trade publishing from 1986 to 1998:

publishing was historically a business with a low return - (5% was a figure banded about) which was unacceptable in an era when 20% returns were becoming the norm (I blame wall street's inflated return levels for this but that's another essay). This led to pressure to publish sure things either new books by already established authors or series (you'll notice Robert Ludlum is apparently still writing some years after his death).

Editorial decay wasn't due just (or even mostly) to increased costs, but to increased demands for profits from higher-ups in GargantuMaw-type conglomerates.

Socialist Space Workers by Gennady Golobokov (1973). Found when I went looking for pictures of "workers".

Mark Liberman at Language Log has come across a heinous example:

John Barth is visiting Penn, and so I took the opportunity to catch up on his most recent meta-fictions, specifically The Development and Every Third Thought. ...

What struck me about The Development was the transformation of every single instance of the singular inanimate possessive pronoun "its" into (the orthographically regular but culturally deprecated form) "it's". Here are some examples from the first couple of pages, starting with the book's second sentence (emphasis added, here and throughout):

My projected history of our Oyster Cove community, and specifically the season of it's Peeping Tom, is barely past the note-gathering stage, …

… HBE's golf course, whose Ecological Sensitivity consists of using recycled "gray water" on it's greens and fairways …

Liberman was reading the Kindle edition of The Development -- you can see the full grammatical horror for yourself by using the "Look Inside" function there. The print edition's Look Inside reveals no such problems, so the typos must have been added during ebook-ification. I don't see the typos in the preview offered for the Barnes&Noble Nook version: it's Kindle-ification, specifically, that is borked.

SF writer Charles Stross points out that :

Amazon don't proofread kindle ebooks -- they're notorious for running a 100% automatic file conversion pipeline. Anything remotely non-standard in the input file causes it to break, entertainingly -- and no human eyeball checks the output until it goes on sale.

Stross is worried about Amazon's monopoly and monopsony powers, but curiously doesn't list their willingness to sell needlessly inferior products as a point of great concern.

If I were Barnes&Noble or Sony, I'd be playing this up to the skies -- make an official guarantee-or-your-money-back that the text of *their* e-books will be identical to the hard copy's. Contra Stross' worries, Tom Simon points out that:

[Amazon's] share of the ebook market peaked a year or so back, at about 90 percent, and has been shrinking ever since. It was not because of monopoly power that they acquired such a large market share, but simply because they were the first major player to take ebooks seriously and make an effort to earn that business. First-mover advantage does not equal monopoly. Based on information from various sources, I gather that Amazon's share of the ebook market has declined to about 70 percent.

Now, you may say that Kindle mangling the text of a prestigious literary writer has nothing to do with the publishing industry, it's completely the fault of Amazon.

Bollocks, says I. Publishing companies that actually cared about the quality of the work being sold under their names would have written quality-control clauses into their contracts with Amazon as a matter of course. They'd also monitor the finished e-books, to make sure that Amazon wasn't making unauthorized changes. In Barth's case, he might actually be able to sue for copyright violation or other infringement, because Amazon (and the publisher) are selling, under his name, a text that makes him look bad, reducing the value of his "brand". He could even argue that he didn't write the text they're selling, because the pervasive mutilation changes the delivery and perception of the story.

People who are in publishing and who still have professional standards need to notice that the industry they're working in does not: its only standard is (apparently) profit. I don't see how imprints that are part of a GargantuMaw can hope to keep their professional standards, given that their corporate masters very clearly don't have any.

Baker Oostwaert and His Wife by Jan Steen (c.1658). I guess that bakers of this period are pictured with blowing horns because it was their custom to do so when a fresh batch of bread was out of the oven and ready for sale. I'm using the picture of a baker because adulteration of bread was a long-standing problem in European society.

---

UPDATE:

Mark Liberman reports that the same typo is visible in the Free Sample offered by B&N, so the problem does *not* come from Amazon, but (almost certainly) from the publisher's end. You can see the full effect by searching for "it's" in the Google e-Books version, which also includes the typo.

The evidence for this book, at least, is that publishers are converting text files to e-book formats without having a competent human so much as glance at the result before sending them to the e-book companies. What can I call this besides flagrantly unprofessional?

Comments

[Mark Liberman]

I downloaded the free sample of the Nook edition from Barnes & Noble, and it has exactly the same problem as the Kindle edition. (See my response to your comment at Language Log, in case the hyperlink is erased by your typepad installation.)

[Doctor Science]

Mark:

Thanks for doing that research! I'm sure we'd all be very interested to hear what Mr. Barth thinks about the problem, should you bring it up when you see him at Penn.

[Robotech_Master]

Hey, Doc. The interesting thing about e-books from pro publishers is that it's not that stores like Amazon or B&N don't care about the quality of the books they make available. It's that they are prohibited by their contracts with the publishers from making any changes at all—even to fix typos. Any fixes or changes of any kind have to come down from on high.

There have been some pretty hilarious typos in e-books. For example, these from Diane Duane's "Young Wizards" series or a particularly embarrassing one that proves "shift happens". A lot of them are attributable to bad (or unedited) OCR conversions from pre-e-book printed form. Apparently publishers just entrust their e-books to scripts because they don't want to spend the time, money, and effort to deal with them.

[Nigel]

Though I still prefer the old paper age model, one of things which made the Kindle so much fun was the ability to carry around an entire library of out of copyright classics, at very reasonable prices.

The joy of having all of Dickens to hand is somewhat diminished by the prevalence of obvious OCR errors.

I expect things will improve gradually, and much appreciate efforts to speed the process along.

[Slartibartfast]

Amazon don't proofread

Probably they're not alone in this. I doesn't proofread sometimes, too.

[hairshirthedonist]

From Wikipedia (emphasis mine):

Charles David George "Charlie" Stross (born 18 October 1964) is a British writer of science fiction, Lovecraftian horror and fantasy.

Amazon is a "they" to Brits, rather than an "it" as to Americans, thus the subject-verb agreement looks funny to you, yank.

[Countme-In]

How many commas remain in Kindle's version of the Second Amendment, I wonder?

As to proofreading, I've done it myself professionally years back -- on paper with a red pencil.

I still can't proofread or edit on a computer screen. I just can't SEE what I am doing.

Sometimes, I repeat repeat words in my comments, you know what what I mean? And no matter how many times I scan the text, I don't catch it.

As to Wall Street --- blech --- since Inauguration Day, 1981, they've made a commodity of everything. Especially employees, who must now stand on one foot as they work (figuring they'll be lighter in weight that way; it's a quant thing) because it's cheaper not to have load-bearing walls in the workplace.

It's the WalMart 50-gallon drum of Giles Goat-Boy Meat Product for everyone, except for those who can afford the high-margin specialty boutique gated community writing product.

At the urging of the University of Chicago, natch.

I fully expect Amazon to offer Barth's works with the "its" restored but it will be a higher-priced add-on. Like luggage fees on airlines or the nine-dollar hospital aspirin.

Or maybe they'll have apostrophe derivatives, bundled together so you don't notice -- well, until the world's punctuation system implodes altogether.

Wait until they get done with medical care in this country.

[Mattmcirvin]

Fred "Slacktivist" Clark has observed that the same thing happened in newspaper publishing: even in the age of newsprint, it was never a high-return business, and the expectation of high returns was one of the things that led to the gutting of newspaper staff and a consequent decline in quality, disappearance of real investigative journalism and tendency to print unaltered press releases.

[Subnumine]

Selling inferior products as though they were standard is one of the usual advantages of monopoly. Stross may well assume we know this.

[Doctor Science]

Subnumine:

It's been pointed out that booksellers -- including Amazon -- are prohibited from changing the texts they sell, including fixing typos. No, the typos are being inserted by the *publishers*, probably because they outsource the ebook-ification process and never bother to check it over.

[doretta]

What I don't get is all the OCR errors--and turning "corner" into "comer", a problem I've seen in a number of ebooks, is clearly an OCR error. Haven't we been in the age of electronic publishing for quite some time now? Surely the master for that printed book exists in electronic form?

[Doctor Science]

doretta:

That's what I thought, too! But I've been informed:

I don’t know specifics about any particular publishing house, from everything I’ve read and heard from friends in big publishing, no one saves anything in the publishing process except the contracts.

Writing friends make me crazy because they are as bad as the publishing houses to delete files from the various stages of editing.

I don't understand the mindset, frankly.

[liberal japonicus]

I think that a lot of writers don't like to be second guessed. If you have all of my revisions back from when I first put fingers to keyboard, the process by which the final product gets to your hands probably seems a lot more mundane, I imagine.

About OCR errors, there was a recent flap about Google asking users to decode blurry house numbers in the UK, which was apparently an outgrowth of the use of captcha codes to help decode OCR errors, which I thought was interesting. I'm not sure if doretta is amazed that the OCR process goes on with no human oversight, or something else, but the use of people to check these OCR errors was interesting to me.

[Turbulence]

I think what amazes doretta is the idea that publishing companies start off having electronic copies of books they publish and then lose those files, so that whenever they have to issue an electronic edition, their only option is to scan and perform OCR on a print copy. Given that you could store an electronic copy of every book even a large publishing company has ever printed for free, this behavior seems very dumb.

This seems like a very strange practice. In contrast, the music industry seems much more rational when it comes to preserving original recording masters. Even some universities now have a policy that the library system must receive electronic copies of all theses.

[Catsy]

I don't understand the mindset, frankly.

Neither do I. Storage is cheap.

Of course, my pack-rat mentality takes it to a bit of an extreme--I still have archived email from 1996 lying around somewhere...

[Countme-In]

"The evidence for this book, at least, is that publishers are converting text files to e-book formats without having a competent human so much as glance at the result before sending them to the e-book companies. What can I call this besides flagrantly unprofessional?"

A business decision.

Efficiency.

Productivity improvement.

Reducing overhead.

Reducing headcount.

Mortgage bundling.

Return on investment.

Maximizing profit.

Rationalization.

Howard Roark, in Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead", would have referred to this practice as "balconies", and reached for the dynamite.

Even Roark's altruism, toward his creations, gets the heave-ho in the world Rand has wrought.