eBooks and pBooks?
04/25/10 10:25 Filed in: ebooks
Steven Levy on Kindle errors:
Before a recent trip, I downloaded the latest Stephen Hunter novel to my Kindle. Hunter writes about shooters, so it’s not surprising that the name of the book is I, Sniper.
Not that you’d know it from the title screen. The only words on that e-ink page were “I, Snipper.” Snipper! I thought I was about to nestle into a tale of tough guys who take out human targets from hundreds of yards away. But this promised to be the autobiography of a mohel....
I thought “snipper” was a pretty big snafu, so I decided to play a little joke on my buddy, an editor at Simon & Schuster, which published the book. I took a picture of the misspelled title page and emailed it to him. The next day he emailed me back: “Because of your eagle eye, Amazon is fixing today, even correcting existing Kindle purchases.”
So why is my title page still wrong? According to Amazon.com’s Drew Herdner, “When we find a copyediting or formatting error in a book, we ask the publisher for a new file and replace the one in the Kindle Store so that new purchases of the book do not have the error. We will update the file for a book a customer has already purchased only when the customer asks us to.”
My Kindle purchase “was treated just like an error in a normal p-book,” says Simon & Schuster’s senior publishing manager, Leah Wasielewski, using a term that will be increasingly useful as the e-variety approaches the norm. The publisher’s belief that Amazon had automatically changed sold versions, too, was “a miscommunication,” she adds.
More here. P-books is now the phrase?
Before a recent trip, I downloaded the latest Stephen Hunter novel to my Kindle. Hunter writes about shooters, so it’s not surprising that the name of the book is I, Sniper.
Not that you’d know it from the title screen. The only words on that e-ink page were “I, Snipper.” Snipper! I thought I was about to nestle into a tale of tough guys who take out human targets from hundreds of yards away. But this promised to be the autobiography of a mohel....
I thought “snipper” was a pretty big snafu, so I decided to play a little joke on my buddy, an editor at Simon & Schuster, which published the book. I took a picture of the misspelled title page and emailed it to him. The next day he emailed me back: “Because of your eagle eye, Amazon is fixing today, even correcting existing Kindle purchases.”
So why is my title page still wrong? According to Amazon.com’s Drew Herdner, “When we find a copyediting or formatting error in a book, we ask the publisher for a new file and replace the one in the Kindle Store so that new purchases of the book do not have the error. We will update the file for a book a customer has already purchased only when the customer asks us to.”
My Kindle purchase “was treated just like an error in a normal p-book,” says Simon & Schuster’s senior publishing manager, Leah Wasielewski, using a term that will be increasingly useful as the e-variety approaches the norm. The publisher’s belief that Amazon had automatically changed sold versions, too, was “a miscommunication,” she adds.
More here. P-books is now the phrase?