When Amazon went to war against punctuation

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Graeme Reynolds wrote about how Amazon went to war against punctuation.

Apparently Amazon had received a complaint from a reader about the fact that some of the words in the book were hyphenated. And when they ran an automated spell check against the manuscript they found that over 100 words in the 90,000 word novel contained that dreaded little line. This, apparently “significantly impacts the readability of your book” and, as a result “We have suppressed the book because of the combined impact to customers.”

Graeme responded to Amazon explaining how hyphenated words were perfectly acceptable in English.

This was Amazon’s reply:

Hello Graeme,

Thanks for contacting us and giving me the opportunity to help you. I will be more than glad to assist you with your inquiry.

As quality issues with your book negatively affect the reading experience, we have removed your title from sale until these issues are corrected. Books with serious errors that are not corrected after 60 days will have their product detail pages removed from the website. Your book will still appear in your Bookshelf, and you can update it and resubmit it at any time.

Once you correct hyphenated words, please republish your book and make it available for sale.

This incident is another reminder of the power Amazon has over authors and book publishers. They seem to have no qualms about pulling the plug at their whim over such a minor issue, and end up screwing up the livelihood of authors.

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