Dear Jeff Bezos: Here's an easy, effective way to fix the production problems in Amazon Kindle-edition books and, at the same time, prove that the Kindle is really, truly better than paper
Posted by Tom Moertel Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:57:00 GMT
I recently purchased a Kindle DX, mainly to read PDF documents that contain math and comp-sci formulas. Still, I couldn’t resist the temptation to try out the instant gratification of purchasing a “Kindle edition” ebook, so I ordered a sci-fi novel I had read as a child, Alan Dean Foster’s The Tar-aiym Krang.
The Good
The purchase and download via the ever-so-branded “Whispernet” wireless network went without a hitch. The Kindle DX, itself, was great and made reading easy. The text looked good, the navigation seemed intuitive. There was just one problem.
The Bad
The production standards of the content destroyed any chance of convincing me that I was reading something akin to a real book. I found numerous typographical errors, something that just doesn’t occur in real mass-market books, which have been subjected to professional review after typesetting. By far, the most common error was the substitution of a left open single quote for what should have been an apostrophe, an error that I don’t think Amazon missed an opportunity to make. For example, when shortening computer to ’puter:
The brilliant fix (no need to thank me, Mr. Bezos)
So, if you’re Jeff Bezos, you’re probably wondering what you can do to improve the quality of Kindle edition books. After all, you spent all that time, effort, and money on the Kindle itself, getting the look and feel just right, crafting the perfect book-reading experience, even insisting upon seamless “Whispernet” downloads to encourage impulse purchases of Kindle editions. You certainly wouldn’t want the content owners, the lovely folks who supply you with typo-ridden source documents, to undo all that you have worked so hard to achieve with the Kindle, to destroy the immersive, luxurious reading experience that you are so close to delivering, to unweave the spell that convinces readers that the Kindle is just as good as – if not better than! – a real book. Somehow, you must fix the content problem, but you know, you just know, the content owners are going to screw it up for you.
So, here’s what you do, Jeff. Let the content owners screw it up – you know that’s what they’re going to do, anyway – and fix the errors yourself. How? With an army of focused, motivated proofreaders: your customers!
Seriously, this idea would work miracles for you, Jeff. You know how the Kindle lets you make annotations to the Kindle editions you read? Just extend those annotations to include corrections. Then when those annotations are saved to Amazon’s servers, extract the corrections, combine them with the corrections from other readers, maybe verify them with a quick third-party review (a perfect job for the Mechanical Turk, wouldn’t you say?), and then automagically distribute the relevant, approved corrections to every Kindle reader who could benefit from them. Further, to make your readers happy that they found mistakes in the Kindle editions that they purchased, offer them a bounty, say 25 cents, for the first report of each correction found.
In one fell swoop, all your problems with production quality are fixed:
- customers who find errors are no longer angry but happy
- most Kindle editions will be corrected quickly, ensuring a blemish-free reading experience for the bulk of your customers
- even if the content owners give you garbage for source documents, and even if they won’t allow you to change those documents one iota (they are pretty controlling, after all), you can still deliver perfection to your customers: apply corrections on the “client side,” correcting the pristine, yet error-filled source material, on the fly, right in the Kindle itself
And there’s one big bonus I didn’t mention. This capability would make Kindle editions better than real books. Not just marketing-copy, in-theory better, but really better. As in, now we have a compelling reason to switch from paper: to get the benefits of collaborative, peer-augmented reading and correction, in which each reader’s contributions enrich the reading experience for all who follow. Think about it, Jeff, it’s a big deal.
No need to thank me.
readers
I somehow doubt the content owners would be happy with Amazon selling a modified version of their product.
Even if it could be made completely legal - by separating corrections from the original, and downloading them separately, for instance - the content owners would still bitch about it, and, right now, Amazon is bowing to every demand they make.
The day will come, though… :-)
“I found numerous typographical errors, something that just doesn’t occur in real mass-market books”
Really? We must not be reading the same books. I’ve found at least one - and often several - typographic or spelling errors in every mass-market book I’ve read recently. Often they are homonym errors, which a spell-checker won’t catch. For some reason (probably related to my programmer OCD tendencies) they jump out at me.
Paul R. Potts wrote:
I also find one, two, perhaps three errors in the typical book (but rarely any in flagship books from the best publishers). What I’m talking about here, however, is markedly more errors than is typical, perhaps 10. Have you often found 10 typos in a single work?
I might expect that error rate in a self-published, straight-from-Word effort, but not in professionally published books, which is what Kindle editions are represented as. Amazon Kindle isn’t, after all, marketed as Lulu.com for the rest of us. It’s supposed to be the future of “real” publishing, done right.
The point I’m trying to convey is that some important quality-control step is missing from the Amazon-Kindle-edition publishing process. Going directly from the content provider to the reader, skipping the traditional typesetting and galley-review processes, eliminates a lot of time and expense, but also a host of quality checks, quality checks that most people might not know were taking place, quality checks that actually improve works in a way that is noticeable, at least to this reader.
Thanks for your comment.
Cheers,
Tom
Brilliant idea really, even without all the mechanical turk checking and 25 cent bonuses.
I’m sure content providers will fight this type of stuff tooth and nail, as Daniel mentioned above, but a day will come when dead tree copies just won’t be relevant anymore. I’m sure that we’ll see functionality like this eventually.