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Originally Posted by radleyp
I am not sure what Bowerbird's point is, but the idea that self-publishing - now made cheaper by etext - will "liberate" us is crazy.
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Not at all.
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Originally Posted by radleyp
All kinds of garbage is submitted to publishers today, and they save us the trouble of wading through it by refusing to publish. Self-publishing, however, means that there will be no publisher (or, very likely, editor) and we will all be swimming in the unreadable.
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I completely agree.
But Publishers don't just sort out the bad. They make a judgement based on whether or not the book will sell well. That's all. The idea that publishers, in general, know good literature from bad is false.
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Originally Posted by radleyp
I don't look forward to this at all. Self-publishing is a dangerous trap: authors are too often terrible judges of what they write. You all talk about publishers as if all they did was print and bind. Just wait for all that self-published text, you'll live to regret it.
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What will happen, as what usually happens in a capitalistic society that allows for innovation, is that many services will arise that will "grade" the self-published eBooks.
Unlike the current publishers, they will not base their rating on how well the book sells but rather on how good the book is.
So we get the same filtering. But now we get filters based, not on the sell-ability of the book, but on how good the book is based on who rates it.