Amazon 'suppresses' book with too many hyphens

[HareBrain]

What with the Orwell misquoting, and now this, we have to start wondering if someone is trying to bring Amazon down from the inside by making it look ridiculous.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/bo...yphens-graeme-reynolds-high-moor-2-moonstruck

(Apologies for stealing the article's title -- I couldn't think of a better one.)

Nice to see the semi-colon getting some love too!

 

[Juliana]

The reviews at the end of the article are simply brilliant.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

They did re-instate it. I agree, though, if you made it up people would laugh.

 

[Kerrybuchanan]

Hilarious. The world has gone mad.

 

[alchemist]

I'm flabbergasted. Proper you-could-knock-me-down-with-a-feather flabbergasted.

 

[TheDustyZebra]

I can see I'll never have anything on Amazon. Assuming they hate dashes as much (maybe twice as much) as hyphens, that is. And sorry, Gary, but they'll probably pull Malevolence because of me.

 

[Gary Compton]

You are sacked LOL

 

[TheDustyZebra]

Well, you just have to have a plan in place to deal with complainers -- do you have a guy with a big stick on retainer?

 

[Boneman]

What great publicity for his book... quick: to the hyphen-mobile!

 

[Foxbat]

What's next? Refusing to stock Guardians of the Galaxy 2 on DVD because a customer complained it has too many camera angles?

Absolutely mental!

 

[Gary Compton]

Malevolence has 164 hyphens. I just counted them all!

 

[Kerrybuchanan]

Maybe you could use it as a marketing ploy Gary? 'Tickety Boo Press trumps Amazon in the hyphen stakes.'

 

[Gary Compton]

I havent read it but is it not long words that get hyphenated rather than say something like wooly-jumper?

 

[TheDustyZebra]

Malevolence has 164 hyphens. I just counted them all!

How many of them are mine?

 

[Gary Compton]

All of them

 

[Dave]

Thanks, that was an interesting read, especially the comments section. Read them again even if you have once, because there are some more recent funny ones. The explanation, regarding the lack of decent line justification software on the Kindle is also very interesting. He says that the poor legibility is the fault of Amazon and would cost them very little to fix, yet instead they blame authors and publishers.

 

[tinkerdan]

An author friend of mine had their work suppressed when someone complained that the work either had no table of contents or there were errors in the table of contents.

My take on this is that there might be some automated process that accepts complaints and suppresses the work until the author comes back and says, "really?"
Either way it seems that there is some place where something or someone fails to recognize pettiness.

Every time I use search in a kindle document for specific text it stops at the first 100 it finds; so that could indicate there were more than a hundred unless this is some problem that only I encounter.