Does JNC receive Amazon corrections?
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Question for the JNC staff. Do you receive the customer corrections reported on the Amazon Kindle app?
The Kindle app has a feature for reporting typos and other errors encountered while reading.
Sadly, LNs tend to have relatively high error rates, and I've been trying to do my part to improve the experience for other readers. I've been diligently reporting typos in Kindle for years now. The interaction always finishes with a robotic thanks, and a promise that an Amazon customer care specialist really cares and will handle it. I have never yet received any kind of follow-up or acknowledgement, nor even a notification when an updated volume (with the issue potentially addressed) was available. Nor is it possible to get a history of reported errors so that I can follow up. For all I know, the correction are nothing more than a way to keep fussy customers quiet, and are immediately discarded.
I would like to get some inside information from the JNC staff. Does anything get accomplished by reporting errors on Kindle?
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@unknownmat There is a "quality issues" panel where sometimes we do receive those kinds of corrections from Amazon, but they don't come very often, once every few months for a small batch of books. We also get a lot of false flags and bad corrections in addition to EPUB construction nitpicks ("It's confusing when text in the TOC isn't a link, please remove it," that kind of thing).
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@unknownmat
I've found that I have better results reporting errors directly to the publisher than working through Amazon for things that are pretty clearly 'prior to Amazon doing Kindle creation transfigurations' stuff.
Amazon tends to be a black hole.Thankfully, JNC does have a publicized method of contacting them via email for such issues, and goes so far as to send responses when they disagree with what I'm reporting as an error; someone actually sends personal responses explaining why they think it's not an error if they disagree, which blows me away when I think about it.
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@myskaros Thanks. So if I'm understanding you correctly, Amazon has a panel that does some initial filtering and then reports it to you infrequently for certain titles (I would guess the more popular titles that sell in enough volume to make it worthwhile). Among the corrections are some useful fixes along with a bunch of false positives and epub formatting complaints. Do I have that right?
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@unknownmat My best guess is they have an actual human-staffed team that reviews the corrections being submitted and decides what gets sent on to the publisher/author for fixing. Otherwise you have it right based on what I've seen myself.
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@weasalopes Thanks. I have sent a few corrections to the JNC email, but have never gotten a response. I'm usually thrilled if any post of mine to one of the corrections forums receives an upvote.
Being honest, my issue is just one of laziness. I usually read on my tablet, but email on my PC. So the Kindle feature was really nice because I can report the issue as I encounter it just by highlighting the problematic text. c.f Remembering the issue when I get to my PC hours later, finding the publisher email address, and then carefully explaining the context sufficiently for the correction to make sense. It's just too much extra work.
Of course, this theoretical advantage is moot if the correction never makes it to the publisher.
CLARIFICATION: When I submit a correction to JNC email, I do get an acknowledgement - "Thanks for submitting" - but I never learn the disposition of my submitted corrections.
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@unknownmat
Most of the time all I get is the generic "thanks for submitting this, we'll forward it to the appropriate translation team" thing.But there was one time where they really did disagree with my suggestion, and emailed back concerning why they disagreed concerning it being in error.
It was a really weird section of text in how it could be interpreted, whether it was spoken aloud or a mental thought to self, and that was made worse by the title of a book showing up as part of it; book titles go in italics, and if it was spoken that's how it should display, and if a mental think... it was a truly weird formatting issue, to put it mildly.But they discussed it with me.
They disagreed, and still disagreed at the end of it all, but they didn't round file it when they decided they disagreed, they informed me as to why they weren't in agreement.That impressed me.
These days, my submissions tend to be screen prints with highlighted text and text boxes explain what I see as the problem.
