Four Bugs Fixed This Week

All four of these fixes started the same way. Someone using BetaBooks noticed something was off and took the time to tell us. I want to say thank you for that.

Word counts were inflated. When you paste from Word, Google Docs, or Scrivener, BetaBooks keeps simple formatting like bold and italics. The problem was that our counter was also counting some of that invisible formatting as words: link addresses, markup, and other bits that are not really part of your prose. It was also treating curly apostrophes — in contractions like can’t or possessives like Harry’s — as word breaks, so one word could count as two. One author reported more than 104,000 words in BetaBooks versus about 100,000 in Word. We fixed the counting logic and recalculated existing books.

Beta readers lost comments on spotty connections. When a reader wrote feedback and hit save, a network hiccup could silently drop the comment. There was no retry, and the draft text was gone. Now failed saves retry automatically, and if that does not work, the text stays in the editor so nothing is lost.

Chapter text got corrupted on mobile Safari. When readers navigated between chapters on iPhones and iPads, inline highlights from feedback could cause the page to display garbled or swapped words. It looked like the text was glitching, but it was a rendering timing issue. The repaint we used to fix it was running too early — before the highlights were actually applied. We moved it to the right moment.

Declined card payments showed a generic error. When a card was declined — say, for insufficient funds — Stripe gives us a clear message about why. But we were throwing it away and showing a generic “something went wrong” instead. The user had no idea what to fix. Now the actual decline reason is shown, and the subscription form stays open so you can try another card without losing your place.

None of these were big features. They were details — the kind of thing that quietly makes an experience harder for no good reason.

We want to improve BetaBooks, little by little. And the best way we can know what needs care is when you tell us about it. So if something feels off, please write in. We are listening.

— Pedro