End of the conveyor belt: A bookstore’s perspective on quality control, support improvements, and user feedback

So you’ve produced your ebooks and dropped them onto an FTP or hit the “send to the world” button in your fancy automated distribution tool – what happens next? Well, if you’re sending them to Kobo, all kinds of things happen. They may or may not be reviewed by a human before they even go on sale. Once on sale, they may be reported by a mobile user who’s having trouble reading the book and that report would be investigated internally to see if the issue reported is reproducible. The book might be extracted from our system and pulled apart if it produces a previously unknown issue and in some cases they’ll be pulled from sale and reported to the publisher or distributor. Some titles may find themselves listed as examples in bug reports or feature requests or used as part of a business case to improve or fix something pertaining to content support. In addition to a general overview of ebook testing and support at Kobo, Ben will also provide some historical context for how processes and reading platforms have evolved at Kobo over the years, including fixes and features added in the past year, significant obstacles faced in the past (Fixed Layout, font obfuscation, CSS overrides), and lessons learned so far.