RicDay on Publishing

Each new way of delivering content to computing devices seems to start with what we used to call “shovelware” — a bunch of somewhat related “stuff” shovelled onto the delivery medium and shipped out to a public fascinated by the new technology. In these early days of ebooks, many are shovelware.

It probably started with CP/M programs for computers in the early 80s. I can recall buying 8-inch (and later 5-inch) floppy disks from Lighthouse Associates up on the edge of Harlem in New York, then wading through their content to find something useful, like the source code for Ward Christensen’s ReSource disassembler and XMODEM programs. I bought data cassettes of uncertain provenance with similar compilations.

The advent of CDs saw the same phenomenon: disks loaded with mostly dubious junk, the occasional gem lurking in the bowels of the beast for the diligent to discover.

There was a reasonable excuse in the era when data cassettes and floppies ruled. There was no Internet and even when some of us had access to Arpanet, it was less of a file sharing medium than one of conversation.

After the web arrived, the term “shovelware” pretty much disappeared. I want to revive it.

Ebook Shovelware

After reading nearly 200 ebooks, I think many deserve the shovelware moniker. I'm talking of those ebooks that have clearly been converted from print files with no attention to the quality of the conversion. They are legion, from the biggest names in publishing.

I assume that those big publishing houses (yes, I'm talking especially of the “Big 6”) still employ competent editors and proofreaders, despite the evidence to the contrary in the backlist titles they are selling.

I can only conclude that no one bothered to take a look at the converted content before shovelling it out the door to help Amazon and all the other ebook vendors add another six- or seven-digit number to their claim of having a bazillion ebooks evailable for sale.

I have read “brand name” ebooks in the past two years with as many as one error per page: concatenated words where a soft hyphen was misconverted; weird characters where punctuation marks did not convert; and entire passages messed up because the author used some other language than English in a phrase or a sentence.

Pricing Junk

If publishers wonder why ebook buyers believe retail prices over $10 are too high, look in the mirror. How many thousands of backlist titles did you shovel out the door without proofing or editing, after the files were converted in some low labor cost venue?

I, for one, am seriously pissed off when I pay a Lexus price and discover I have received a Lada.

Don't even get me started on the subject of bad metadata which causes ebooks to be placed in entirely the wrong categories in ebook vendor sites.