Wednesday, August 26, 2015


Bookvetter.com - some serious teething issues?

A while back I was shouting the praises of Bookvetter.com, a website for readers and authors, where reviews are exchanged anonymously, the basic premise being that if you (the author) want reviews then you also have to give back by reading and reviewing other books - I still like the idea, it's simple and fair. Of course it is open to abuse, as is just about everything on the internet, but it's early days yet, and I think the road-map is both ambitious and has potential.

However, (as opposed to 'but'.) there are some issues with it's functionality that you need to be aware of if you are going to use this site:

1. The format that you submit your manuscript in. This is not an problem exclusive to Bookvetter, as I had the same issue with an Amazon submission, Somewhere between uploading a Pdf and it arriving on the site, there seems to be a glitch where-by double lettered words lose a letter - 'all' becomes 'al', 'filling' becomes 'filing' and 'call' becomes 'cal'. but only on certain devices.

2, Talking of 'certain' devices; gone are the day's where a book was read purely on paper. The birth of the e-book was a massive evolution; the use of modern technology take affordable reading to the masses should not be under estimated. But 'technology' is advancing at an unbelievable rate, now people are reading books on kindle, laptops, ipad, mobile phones - and on and on... The problem here though is the PDF does not transpose well across these different devices, the formatting goes haywire.

Six reviews:
Formatting:
Perfect  2
Amatuer  4
Unacceptable  0

Grammar:
Acceptable  4
Moderate  1
Unsatisfactory  1

This in turn leads to some dissatisfied readers!

If someone can come up with a standard format for both upload and read (regardless of device) then there is money to be made. From an authors perspective it is not good news in the current model, unwittingly exposing readers to a substandard experience goes a long way to tainting a reputation, something one can ill afford in such a cut throat market.

So BEWARE!

Should the book have been published?
Exceptional 1
Average 3
No  2

I still think Bookvetter.com has a positive future, I am just concerned about the damage that can be done in the short term.

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