Kindle Edition Editors

Can I have a word with you people who take published books and turn them into Kindle books? Let’s talk about the Kindle version of The Stone of Tears by Terry Goodkind.

Seriously, what kind of crack were you people smoking when you gave this project over to a high school intern? The number of typos is astronomical. The intern apparently speed-typed the text without ever looking back at what he’d typed. Possibly on a smart phone with auto correct enabled. Or, more likely, somebody OCRed it but never bothered to look at the results.

There are no paragraph indents. There’s no table of contents, either. Words are missing from sentences. “Than” is usually seen as “that.” And it’s not just here and there, like in the first book, it’s on every page. It’s really a masterpiece of editing sucktasticness. Self-published books are better edited than this thing was. Oh, and get this: The publisher charged $8.54 for it. In other words, FULL PRICE.

This is a clear case of a publisher giving a big old F U to their e-book customers. And they wonder why people think they’re evil. I should seriously get a refund on this steaming pile of typographical chaos.

P.S. I purchased it on 3/14/2012. The Kindle version was missing from Amazon for a while after that. As of this typing on 3/25, it’s back. I can only hope they at least fixed the paragraph indents. If they did, I hope they’re planning to push me the updated version.

P.P.S. The story was pretty good. :) Which makes it all the more infuriating.