This is off-topic, but not totally unrelated. I sent sometimes in November of last year an email to a Japanese publisher, complaining about the poor quality of the CD attached to a language manual otherwise very valuable. The lack of recorded sources of natural spoken Japanese is a major issue for learning and teaching liaison interpreting. The scope of Japanese podcasts is paltry as usual, featuring mostly lame commercial content, over formated or stifled audio journalism reciting pieces of printed material. This one rare manual was basically the recording and transcription of interviews with many next door Japanese people giving their opinions on a lot of social issues. Again, it was a rare piece of audio content I was looking forward to exploit with my students. That was before I listened to the audio CD. How such a poor recording quality could have been made into a product was beyond imagination. Even in poor over the phone interpretation, I never met with such useless audio environment.
Four months later, I received an answer to my message. The publisher is blaming the author of the book who came with that poor recording in order to sell her project. The recording was poor because the author was not a professional at recordings. The publisher originally thought the poor recording worked against the project to make it into a CD+Book product, but the idea was so good (it is), and the author so pushy that they accepted. The publisher even states that the recording was somewhat manipulated by some professional to make it a little bit less worse. She ends up being sorry but comes up with the bright news that someday, in the second print, they may consider getting the help of some (more) audio professional to somewhat try and make the recording less worse than worse.
It's a great piece of sociology and human relationship down here in Japan. I am not sure if you can call the author the winner, but in the country where the customer is king, it is the king that gets dethroned. How the publisher shifts the responsibility of the poor recording to the author and begs for forgiving to having abode to the author's desperate plea to get published is brilliant. A typical Japan that can't say no situation. You will read in books about giri, jinjo and all the paraphernalia of human relationship and still not get it until you experiment all this in an extreme way.
I, as a customer, almost forgave the poor author, but not the publisher. They have to get read of the first print and fraud another few hundreds customers to be until they may take action with the promise of a possible better version. As they say here, you just raise your hands as a sign of letting it off.
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