Ebook Standards Collective

[VydorScope]

Personally I think it is too subjective for that. If I look at my own ebooks, I have a bunch of reviews that say something along the lines of "MIND MELTING AWESOME" (yes, real quote) and another group that says "OMG YOU SUCK! NEVER WRITE AGAIN!" (not a heck of a lot in between actually LOL) I suspect that would be the case for any review board. They might hate/like it but that would not really be a reflection of how good/bad the book will be to any given reader.

[bigjantailor]

Again the idea is not about reviewing rather it is about auditing for copyediting.

There would be a strandard with rules like:
-stuff in quote is exempt
-discloser of the type of English
-discloser of the style if it is a book base of using English in a different say poetic form with a discripetion
-a percentage sample at random
If you cannot write a rule that has an answer yes or no the rule should not be used in the audit.

Subjectivity is the enemy of auditing and the differenance between a review and an audit.

A branch to this would be to get a book into the right gennera. Or possibly to read the whole book to see if the struture works. But really there are limits to how to objectively look at the quality of any work of art. However, by making a system of defining what a reader can expect from an ebook more readers will be likely to take risks on indipendants. This is what Smashwords does with it permium ebooks on a limited scale.

The big guys love the fact there is no structure telling reader where to find quality work in the turbid water of the internet's ebook market. They can sell more of the same without encouraging diversity by keeping the doors of quality locked.

I would rather have a known standard that I could participate in even at a price if it meant reader would know my product had been inspected by inspector #5 and that means it is not going to be riddled with mistakes. If we don't make the structure someone else will.

Have fun, Jan

[VydorScope]

So this is a funny thread considering how many threads there are here about how evil the "gate keepers" where before the break out of independents and ebooks blew the gates off the hinges.

All you are doing is suggesting recreating the very thing the market is currently rebelling against...

[bigjantailor]

I wish I was creative enough to suggest a better idea.

However, as long as we live in a world where money is king and our goal is to be read by those who pay us gold, our success and failure will be judge by the market. The market always tend toward fewer play with more share, unless some type of order/rule is enforced on it (like in the fifties when the big oil was broken up to create competition). Would you like that order to be given by six companies with strict sujective rules on what gets published or by an organization where entry is not governed by the subject matter of the book?

In my mind we either have to rethink what success is and not participate in the market or be a hypocrate and make rules to make the market work for more people than less. We are experiencing the same problem today in our economic markets where we try to say self regulating capitalism is the only way but forget that it was the rules that made the playing feild level that dove much of the success after WW2.

Yes, I'm a hypocrite.

Give an Idea of how to make this turmoil work that is not base on old phylosiphies and I will embrace it as zealot.

Have fun, Jan

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by VydorScope

So this is a funny thread considering how many threads there are here about how evil the "gate keepers" where before the break out of independents and ebooks blew the gates off the hinges.

All you are doing is suggesting recreating the very thing the market is currently rebelling against...

In the "legacy" gatekeeper system, if your work didn't meet the approval of the gatekeepers, it didn't get published. No way to find out if an excellent story with lousy grammar could find an audience. No way to find out if truly *whacked* bending of the language had an audience, unless you were one of the one or two per decade like Joyce or Burroughs or Keroac who were considered "artistic" rather than just "incompetent" for their literary style choices.

An approval stamp granted or withheld *after* publication is not at all the same. While some customers would indeed refuse to buy anything not approved (and, heh, how many of the Big Six would deign to submit their works for consideration?), plenty of other people would choose to decide for themselves, based on recommendations from friends or just random reading of the blurbs and seeing the covers.

There's a difference between "gatekeeper" and "tour guide." People who don't like guided tours can find their own way; gatekeepers mean that *nobody* gets access to anything not approved.

[latepaul]

It's the difference between there being 6 big corporate restaurant chains and if you want to open a restaurant you need to get a franchise deal off one of them OR anyone can open a restaurant but only some get in the Michelin guide.