Amazon deleted a book because of the large number of hyphens.

A truly strange story happened to writer Graeme Reynolds. His e-book was removed from the Amazon online store for ... excessive use of hyphens !

It all started with the complaint of one of the buyers that “some words in the book are too often written with a hyphen”.

Let us leave aside the fact that there really are people who write complaints about this. But after all, Reynolds paid almost $ 2,000 for professional editing of the book before publication.

We are talking about a werewolf novel “High Moor 2: Insanity” . However, the essence is not in the plot, you never know what books are published. The bottom line is that Amazon took the customer’s complaint seriously and conducted a “linguistic examination” with a spell checker.
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It turned out terrible: more than 100 words in the novel of 90,000 words contain hyphens.

On December 12, 2014, Reynolds received a letter from Amazon with the results of the examination and notification that such statistics "significantly affects readability" and, as a result, "we remove the book because of the cumulative effect on our customers."

It should be noted that the book for the 18 months since the release, there were more than 100 positive reviews. But that did not affect Amazon’s decision.

The writer tried to object. He wrote that "the use of a hyphen to connect two words together is fully consistent with the norms of the English language." But Grammar Natsi from Amazon turned out to be implacable: “Since the quality of your book negatively affects the pleasure of reading, we remove the novel from the sale until these problems are fixed ... When you correct the words with hyphens, please publish the book again and make it available for sale.

Graham Reynolds in his blog pays tribute to Amazon for taking care of the quality of content in the online store, but it is better to pay attention to thousands of 10-page e-books that are automatically generated from free content (for example, from Wikipedia) and put up for sale.

Fortunately, the story received a great response - and Amazon returned the book in its original form.

By the way, among the reviews in the first place now came a review by a certain Duke Leffler: “I liked the book, but I hope that this is a version without hyphens. I read the editorial with hyphens a couple of weeks ago - and spent a week in the intensive care unit. My liver and kidneys failed, and the doctors advised me to take as many words as possible without hyphens if I want to live. ”