Editing Standards
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I'm new to this service. After reading bits of a few different series, I'm disappointed by the sloppy editing of the streaming editions. A full professional edit probably isn't possible before the final book is published, but you shouldn't post chapters without doing a last spellcheck. These chapters are rife with simple errors, particularly missing spaces and orphaned words. Those sorts of errors break the reader's immersion and leave a bad impression.
Have you thought of adding something that would allow readers to report errors/offer suggestions directly from the chapters?
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@Blank46 It's been suggested but that would require a total overhaul of the reader, so even if they want to get around to trying something out, it will probably take years.
Series do have dedicated correction topics for anyone who wants to point out issues or make suggestions, and while it is clunky, you'll likely find that on more popular series, anything you find has already been reported by someone else.
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The history is that the streaming prepublication chapters aren't the final edit.
The streaming chapters were never intended to replace purchasing the finished book.
During prepub folks can report corrections in the forums. Kind of depended upon the translation team whether they'd update the prepub "chapters" as errors were spotted.
So the prepub chapters have always been less reliable than the final published work.Errors to the published work go in by email.
Now that they've created the Reader Library thing, and it is a very recent thing, a month today, the possibility of going back and overwriting the prepub chapters from the published work is apparently under consideration...if they ever have the staff to afford to do so. Which is a big "if".
It's not a trivial action. -
@Geezer-Weasalopes said in Editing Standards:
Now that they've created the Reader Library thing, and it is a very recent thing, a month today, the possibility of going back and overwriting the prepub chapters from the published work is apparently under consideration...if they ever have the staff to afford to do so. Which is a big "if".
I would hope that they considered the resources they had before making the decision to sell the (formerly) streaming parts as a finished product.
New customers (like the OP) can't be expected to judge the streaming parts by the standards under which they were produced, only by the standards under which they are now offered.
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@rsog412 Completely agreed. One of the main reasons I never cared for rentals and why the reader library offers no appeal to me is that I'm not interested in the prepub edits. I find enough errors in the official releases, why would I pay for something of even lower quality?
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I honestly think that an "overhaul" of the reader or even creating a reader from scratch in the modern day and age is not that difficult from a time and resource perspective for a professional company.
If numerous scanlation groups can produce a better manga reader, than J-novel, despite not having a legitimate or consistent revenue stream, I'm not sure what excuse J-novel currently has. Its reading app for both manga and epubs is incredibly simplistic and dated.
Even in a basic PDF viewer there is the ability to highlight and comment on sections.
Anyway, on my 2 cents. I 100% in favour of adding this direct suggestion feature for corrections as its much more efficient than posting sections on a forum thread.
I don't share the same complaint about "pre-pubs" having poor editing as there is no expectation for them as they are not the final draft. However, I have seen in published LN obvious spelling errors and it can be a tiny bit irritating at times.
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@Tremarl said in Editing Standards:
Even in a basic PDF viewer there is the ability to highlight and comment on sections.
It's a little more involved since JNC would need to develop server code to accept corrections and route them to the correct title.
Also, sometimes the correction topic in the forums is a discussion about a point, because some suggested corrections are not black and white errors like "discrete" instead of "discreet," they can be questions about awkward prose or a translation choice,
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I haven't had problems with the quality of the prepubs, although not being a native English speaker might help, and dies make me not the most suited to give a final judgment on them. Anyway, looking at the description it's not mentioned that the material made available is prepubs, so I don't think it's wrong to argue that JNC should offer the final volumes instead, if it's not already the case.
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@Tremarl The biggest hurdle to inline corrections seems to be the necessity for the reader to not allow text selection so people can't just mass export prepub text elsewhere by copy and pasting the whole thing. Manga piracy sites typically don't put a lot of thought into making it so people can't steal things off their sites which makes things a lot less complicated (manga images on JNC are apparently watermarked if you somehow figure out how to direct link them but the reader does some magic to remove them when viewed on the reader)
But then you need to store those corrections in a database, and do you show corrections that have already been proposed, or do you accept dozens of submissions on the same correction because no one can see someone else's submissions due to privacy?
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@jpwong
I'm a technical writer by trade, so I've seen a lot of approaches to reader feedback. Even a tool that'd just spit the feedback out as a forum post with a position reference would lower the bar for the user to bother reporting issues. Any writing team that's strapped for personnel should be happy to create a path for voluntary reviewers to pitch in.I didn't expect a full edit on these pre-pub chapters before posting. But, all authoring tools have some built-in spelling and grammar check. It'd take maybe 15 minutes to run chunks of this size through and correct the obvious errors before you post it. It's something that's been on every publication checklist that I've ever had to work to. A little professional pride is all it takes. ;)
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@Blank46 said in Editing Standards:
But, all authoring tools have some built-in spelling and grammar check. It'd take maybe 15 minutes to run chunks of this size through and correct the obvious errors before you post it. It's something that's been on every publication checklist that I've ever had to work to. A little professional pride is all it takes. ;)
I'm pretty sure they actually do this already. Some things are hard to catch this way though, like using the wrong homonym, accidentally spelling something wrong in a way that makes it a correct spelling for a different word, or spelling a name wrong that the spell check doesn't know so you're expecting to see it highlighted anyway and miss it.
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@pcj
I know that they aren't doing this consistently because of the types of errors that are getting through. I'm not talking about the ones that you're talking about. Those kinds of errors take a thorough edit to completely scrub.
But, stuff like a missing space between two words, that's going to get flagged by a spellcheck and it'll be an obvious fix 90%+ of the time.
The same goes for orphaned words. Orphaned words happen when you change what you intend to write halfway through a sentence. You can subconsciously leave an extra word behind in the sentence. Again, it'll get flagged by most grammar checks and generally be a simple, obvious fix.
Invest 15 minutes or so to rake that kind of garbage out before publishing and the readers won't be grumbling about your sloppiness. -
I can literally go take the ePub run it through free OCR software provided by Samsung with their printing kit and output a word file. It'll take me all of about 4 minutes. Because the OCR software supports importing ePub files and outputting word files. The cost to me would be £0.
So I think this fear is unfounded as there are far easier ways to mass copy or convert the epubs. However, if we assume this is a big concern then just let people select regions and it generates a line reference. The reader already has the capability to save state which section you are looking at. So just be like Page 8 and auto generate a post from it or something.
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@Blank46 Spell check and whatever issues it has aside, being able to automate basic grammar checks might depend more heavily on their workflow. Because I remember awhile ago (5+ years) there was talk about how they use a spreadsheet for translation. I vaguely recall something about it having the Japanese text and translated text in various stages of translation completeness. So depending on their exact workflow the overhead of running the tools may not be worth it.
That isn't to say they shouldn't find someway to run automated checks, just that the cost of implementing that policy for prepubs may simply outweigh the cost of leaving it for whatever QA/proofing steps they already take. It's possible that one of the earlier QA steps is to export the translation and run automated checks against it, but that might happen at point in the cycle too late to have an impact on prepubs.
That dovetails into something else others haven't yet mentioned: from what I can tell, there's no correlation between the timing of when a prepub part goes live and where in the pipeline a particular translation is located. At least from the viewpoint as a prepub reader, they may have a well defined internal process or something, but I haven't seen or heard of any mention of it.
This means that error reports in the corrections topic could essentially be non-actionable except for last minute corrections before final publishing. What I've heard on occasion is that they'll include forum correction reports during the QA stage.
Probably early on in the life of J-Novel Club it was likely prepubs were released essentially as the translator/editor finished the initial translation, but based on what I've seen in recent history I suspect that it's no longer a safe possibility to assume. In some cases in recent history, I've suspected that the initial full translation of a volume has actually been completed by the time prepubs even start and it's just waiting in a queue for QA to start a pass on it.
Given the new reader service, they really need to start updating the streaming parts with the published text. But I'm not holding my breath for that policy change to go into effect any time soon given the stated reasons for why they haven't done so already.
