Over the last couple of month’s I have noticed a steady decline in the quality of e-books. This does not mean that all e-books or for that matter a significant majority are suffering from quality control issues. However, I am implying that I have seen a gradual, purely qualitative decline in the e-books that I have had the pleasure to read. These irregularities revolve around things such as improper use of fonts, incorrect grammar, and/or poorly constructed narratives.
There are theories that attempt to explain this decline, ranging from the infamous “tower of e-babel” in which multiple formats act as a powerful barrier to increased specialization; to “market saturation” which implies that the market is inflated with self-published authors who lack access to editorial staffs. Rich Adin has drawn first blood when he recently outlined a wise model for publishers to adhere to in the coming decades, while sounding the warning horn regarding the decreasing quality of their editorial work.What I think Mr. Adin has also highlighted is a problem that is a bit direr. In order to get a firm grasp on exactly what is happening calls on us to literally become space cadets. Sociologist Diane Vaughan investigated the operational environment at N.A.S.A. following the Challenger crash and came up with a rather startling conclusion. She theorizes that a culture of underperformance became the norm at N.A.S.A. which resulted in the agency taking a chance when the wise course of action would have been to abort the Challenger mission. The tragic outcome of this “culture of lowered expectations” was the televised Challenger disaster.
To put it a bit more bluntly “Normalizing Deviance” is a gradual process of regression in which organizations habitually operate with a lowered expectation of quality until that diminished standard actually becomes the accepted modus operandi. Normally this decline in attention to detail is precipitated by external factors such as an overly competitive market or stiff unyielding deadlines. The former not the latter is what I believe is occurring within the publishing industry as traditional publishers rush e-books to market in order to capitalize on the market’s unparalleled growth.
We as consumers aid the process by insisting on publishers meeting e-book prices which they are ill suited to meet. Self-published authors and small publishing companies exacerbate the situation by lowering the market’s “equilibrium price.”-the price where a consumer and producer are both satisfied. Recognizing this problem I believe will help consumers by allowing them the chance to voice their opinions and thus setting a quality standard which all e-book producers must adhere to early on. We may be seeing this already occurring as some of the folks over at the Amazon Kindle boards have already called for a mechanism to report “poorly formatted e-books..” The road ahead will not be a pretty one but knowing that we should expect a rough ride is infinitely better than riding that road blindly.
Interesting that you whould write today about the decline in quality, which, I would note, extends to both e- and pbooks. I invite you to read my blog today at An American Editor (www.americaneditor.wordpress.com), which also discusses this problem.
I think you have succinctly defined the problem with a phrase that I may have to pilfer for a future blog: normalizing deviance. It accurately — and unfortunately — describes what I consider the paramount problem in the world of books. The paramount problem isn’t too many publishers, too many books, too much greed. The paramount problem is too much illiteracy and the acceptance of declining literacy. Publishers are not the sole provocateurs of declining literacy, but they are an equal partner with the other contributors, such as teachers and the educational system. I believe that many of the publishing world’s problems would be solved with an increase in literacy.
I left this comment over on Rich’s blog, but it’s stuck in moderation:
I agree with the premise, although I’m agnostic on the warranty. The fact of the matter is that when big publishers let stuff like this out on the marketplace, they can’t then turn around and say self-publishers have no gatekeeping system. (Although they do.) Well, if the gate is missing half its components and the lock is open and rusty, why is the gate there?
Readers want a quality product. They don’t really care who gives it to them as long as it’s intriguing and available to be bought.
And as to returns, wasn’t there a big to-do over the fact that Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer was so badly edited it upset even the most diehard of fans, and there was a groundswell to return the book to the bookstores because it was a defective product?
This problem has caught me with the current series I’m reading — Kevin J. Anderson’s “Saga of the Seven Suns” (in Secure eReader format, using Stanza on my iPhone). I’m currently reading book 6. The first four books were fine. The fifth and sixth books suffer from numerous formatting errors, chiefly the failure to turn off italics. The characters think to themselves in italics. Rather than returning to normal after the ‘thoughts,’ the next several paragraphs or pages will continue in italics.
The e-books are from the same publisher. I purchased all of them from Fictionwise. The Fictionwise publishing dates are chronological, beginning with the first book in 2002 and concluding with the seventh book in 2008. This would support the contention that publishers are getting sloppy.
I could be a conspiracy theorist and suggest that this was done intentionally to try and drive people back to print books, but as Rich Adin points out in his comments, this problem extends to p-books, too.
It seems like we now have the illiterate writing and editing material for the literate.
another problem adding to illegibility is an inability to hyphenate words which produces wild justification with font size changes
The feedback has been impressive so let me see if I can contribute some interesting tidbits to this discussion. Over the last couple of years many have contended that our country’s literacy has been challenged by such things as twittering and text messaging. I am not entirely sold on this theory because of the strength of most of our public schools, colleges and universities. Gary Frost weighed in and bought up a fascinating piece of information regarding hyphenation which brings us back to the core problem. I think that the most likely culprit is simply the need to rush to market. Things such hyphenation are not an issue when companies take their time constructing and evaluating their products. The Meyer book is a perfect example of this principle at play. The publisher may have been racing against a burgeoning piracy threat and felt that utilizing an early -poorly edited- release was an acceptable strategy. Ultimately, the consumers must band together and act as a lobby. It does not mean that they need to march on Washington with pitch forks in hand but it does mean that they need speak up as group more often than they presently do. The digital era brings with it tons of great things such as enhanced consumer coordination and also many bad things such as new ways to scam the consumer. If there is hope it surely can be found with Kindlers who have demanded and -for the time being- have won reasonable e-book prices. This just happens to be another one of those battles.
Maybe I’m part of the problem here. I believe in making eBooks affordable and set affordable prices. I will say that I make considerable efforts to ensure that books we publish adhere to high standards in terms of grammar and story continuity (although there are occasionally glitches that sneak through), but maybe I’m one of the enablers.
That said, I’m not sure I’ve seen a correlation between price and quality in the world of books. Certainly I haven’t seen a correlation between quality and best-selling status. The Stephanie Meyers and Dan Brown best-sellers are only examples of this.
Rob Preece
Publisher
Automatic translation software whose results aren’t corrected is certainly part of the problem. But I think another problem is that, for a long time, many publishers simply haven’t taken e-book design seriously. They’ve regarded e-books either as a carbon-copy of the print book (i.e. PDF e-books), or they’ve regarded e-books as ways in which to sell print books (as though e-books were cheap photocopies).
When I began designing my own e-books two years ago, I searched for writings on the topic. After hours upon hours of searching, I found nothing that corresponded to the thousands of books and Websites available to designers of print books, or even the dozens of books and zillions of Websites available to Web designers. Dead simple questions I had – should the copyright notice be placed after the title area, as in print books, or at the end of the file, as in Web pages? – went unanswered. It was hopeless to find answers to complex issues, dealing with the traditional topics of text design. In heaven’s name, where is the Bringhurst of e-book design?
The lack of a single accepted e-book format was certainly part of the problem back then, but I suspect that there simply hasn’t been enough thought given to the unique challenge of e-book design, which is different, on the one hand, from print design, and on the other hand, from Web design.