Amazon Warning Labels

For real? Hilarious. XD

Wait, I wonder how bad something has to be to get such warnings...?

Amazon has a money back guarantee on their e books. I am indifferent about it. If an e book that I had purchased had these issues I would return it for a refund anyway.

I'm cool with it, overall. Sounds like it's going to be based on reader complaints, but the warnings won't be automated -- an actual human will review the complaints before the warning message goes up. So that limits the potential for abuse or false alarms.

Here are a couple of links for reference:

http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-...they-have-spelling-mistakes-or-bad-formatting

http://johndopp.com/writers/amazon-kindle-spelling-mistakes/

The second one includes more clarification from KDP staff about what exactly will trigger quality control warnings.

I'm calling Poe's Law on this. That can't be real.

edit: huh.

And the flurry of "But - it's not fair! It's my style!" defenses from targeted authors begins in 3... 2...

Seriously, though, I do hope they're right, that there's some human oversight. If it's all AI/autocheck, many legitimate books will be unfairly labeled.

Considering some of the really bad editing I've read in some self-published e-books, this may not be a bad thing... I've had a few I complained about and could not finish reading because it was like reading a bad rough draft from a high school English Lit class. Actually, I would expect better work from a high school English Lit class.

Seriously, if they're actually doing a human review, my concern would be that these are human who are literate and able to read/write English at a better than high school level, and not just using a generic spellcheck/grammar check. If, on the other hand, they're just looking at typos, well... I can't say that's a bad thing.

Edited to add - typos happen, but in a finished work? Few to none would be my limit.

I doubt it's going to affect me at all. I don't read self-published books, and if it's a writer I don't know, I read the first two or three pages before buying the book.

That second link in Tavia's post looks like it has "just the facts, Ma'am."

Initially, it seemed only formatting errors would trigger a "warning label" but in footnoted updates, the latest detail is that 10 to 15 typos will trigger a warning. Warnings are called CFQI's -- acronym for Customer Facing Quality Indicators.

Well. I think this is a good thing overall, and will be good, ultimately, for self-published authors because if, over time, this clears up some of the worst quality control issues, then the reputation of self-published books will only benefit.

Brightdreamer said:

And the flurry of "But - it's not fair! It's my style!" defenses from targeted authors begins in 3... 2...

Click to expand...

Well, it does make me wonder about works like Flowers for Algernon and TTYL.

It is real but not what people think.

When people report typos etc in a book it can cause review by Amazon. This happens to 0.000001% of Amazon books and has always happened. The author is sent an email saying they are naughty and must fix the book or it will be withdrawn from sale.

The only thing to change is that now there will be a note on the listing saying this has happened.

Which is basically very boring.

veinglory said:

The only thing to change is that now there will be a note on the list saying this has happened.

Which is basically very boring.

Click to expand...

Yeah. I was very excited when I saw the first panicked thread on kboards, but then I did more digging and realized I'd popped all this popcorn for nothing.

Darn.

Oh well, popcorn is always good.

Kylabelle said:

Darn.

Oh well, popcorn is always good.

Click to expand...

*shares with the class*

veinglory said:

It is real but not what people think.

When people report typos etc in a book it can cause review by Amazon. This happens to 0.000001% of Amazon books and has always happened. The author is sent an email saying they are naughty and must fix the book or it will be withdrawn from sale.

The only thing to change is that now there will be a note on the listing saying this has happened.

Which is basically very boring.

Click to expand...

That makes a lot more sense. I have a hard time seeing how Amazon could identify errors via any sort of automated process. Microsoft Word manages to miss errors and mislabel non-errors all the time.

Plus, it would be a nightmare to enforce with books that intentionally use misspelled words or unconventional grammar, or even fantasy novels with made-up words.

veinglory said:

Which is basically very boring.

Click to expand...

Oh. Guess I should go and read a different thread, then.

But not before I comment that the only ebook I ever bought from Amazon was the Kindle version of a published paperback, which was completely riddled with basic OCR errors. Didn't look like they had proofread it at all after scanning. I was insulted, as I had spent actual money on this thing (as well as spending precious time cracking it so I could put it on my Sony Reader, but that's beside the point. And I didn't even like the book.)

So I hope they've fixed that as well.

I think in theory might be a good thing done properly, but there most definitely needs to be an appeal route. (I never use a grammar checker, because it is too rigid - and didn't give enough information on why it was highlighting things. I got so tired of it saying "I see you used which, would you prefer to use that?" shortly followed by "I see you used that, would you prefer to use which?")

Also need to be careful not to slide over into censorship. This book has 20 f**ks in it or other things less trivial.
Though films come with warnings about content so.....
(Though said warnings are applied by a committee with some accountability (saying some as I have no idea how much accountability there is these days - just watched the odd documentary on how standards have changed).)

The whole thing is an appeal route. Amazon staff review the customer complaints, if they seem legit they send the email saying the book is in danger of being delisted, then the author replies either showing how they fixed it or explaining why the identified text is actually not an error.

Further thought - speech could cause hiccups in the process. Any writing of dialect would probably choke an automated system.

The authors already getting these emails (as seen on kbpards and kdpforum for years) oftne can explain why the text as written is correct.

But keep in mind the errors are not spellchecker detected, they are highlighted and reported by human readers activating review by a genuine human Amazon staff member.