A few days ago, I downloaded a free children’s book from Amazon. The story was good. It really was, but the copy-editing was so awful that while I read it out loud to my kids, I kept stumbling over poor punctuation, format and layout. They totally lost interest whilst I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. This leads me to wonder, is anything free really worth it? (Please don’t read too deeply into that statement, I’m not referring to oxygen!)

I really do find the general level of the proper and correct standard of English in Children’s literature is below average. Aren’t these the very minds we are trying to educate and teach the correct standard? *sitting very high on my horse now*

In this day and age of self-publishing, and basically being able to write whatever you want and send it out there for the world to critique (considering this is a free blog, I’m well aware that what I’m saying is somewhat ironic), do simple things like punctuation and layout not matter? 

In my opinion (as a lover of the English language) surely if you have the creative mind to write a fairly decent children’s story, but possibly not the funds to hire a copy-editor, wouldn’t you go to great lengths to try your best to ensure that your work was as good as it can be, even if that meant simply showing your family and friends and asking them their opinion? 

Maybe the author did. 

Maybe I’m just being a b*tch. 

I’ve never written a book. I’m not an Oxford educated English scholar. 

A few days after I ‘bought it’, I got one of those requests to rate the book, and I rated it quite high, but in the comments section, I was honest. I would hope that if I ever got the courage to publish a formal piece of literature, someone would be respectfully honest with me. 

This is simply just my opinion. I fully expect to be critiqued on this post!  However, the fundamental point of this post is, Is anything Free really worth getting? Or is there always a compromise or catch? Is free worth it?

.