[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BKeeper

I'm absolutely certain there will be plenty of easy and free ways to produce and read ePub documents. Anybody will be able to produce content. ePub is a great step forward. Proper document structure (which allows reflow) will make the difference.

Well, ePub may be a great step forward, if the rest of the industry supports it.

The key is whether it will be a truly open standard that other vendors can produce software to create and view, and not lock you into Adobe as your only option to work with it.

As Dennis says, most writers just want to write. And if they want to selfpublish they aren't scared of using a couple of apps. Besides, self publishing is much more complicated than just creating digital content, I'd say that's the easy part. We should ask Steve. . .

A couple of apps is the easy part.

Any author willing to selfpublish should be willing to invest a little time and money into it. Skilled ones will need smaller investment (actually they invested earlier by learning). If you have even thought about self-publishing then I'd say you can do it.

For appropriate values of "doing it".

SF writer Norman Spinrad commented back in the late '60s that there should be enough magazines being issued that everyone could get published.
That's very nice, but my question then was "Who is going to read it?"

Now, we have the web, desktop publishing, print on demand, and everyone can get published. I still ask the same question: who will read it?

Creating an electronic or paper version of your work is the easy part. Marketing it, and letting the potential audience know it exists and might be of interest is a far greater challenge.

Even authors published by major houses face the challenge. Unless you are an established best seller, support from the publisher will be minimal. SF author Wen Spencer treated the advance from her first novel as a marketing budget, and used it to attend SF conventions and place targeted ads promoting her work. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in her first year, and her career is coming along well, so I'd say she was onto something. Of course, she was helped by the fact that her husband was a well paid executive, and she could afford to devote the advance to marketing and promotion, instead of paying bills. But she recognized that it was up to her to get her name and her work known, and set about doing so.

If somebody thinks that a copy of inDesign is a huge barrier for entering publishing, then well, I'm speechless...

At $700 MSRP, it is not an impulse purchase for the majority of folks.

Moreover, those "big-evil-media conglomerates" have nothing against authors and self-plublished authors, or content creators ... guess what, they need them.

They do, but not all equally recognize the fact.

But it's true that as the ebook revolution progresses it will be possible to have a much more decentralized publishing market.

The role of current publishing houses in that scenario will shift from production and distribution to quality control (ie: content screening)

That has always been the principal role of the publisher: to attempt to seperate the wheat from the chaff, and publish the work worth reading. Manufacturing and distribution are necessary links in that chain, but first you must have something to manufacture and distribute that has a decent chance of selling.

Decentralization of publishing shifts more of the effort to the reader. There are a couple of publishing houses from whom I may buy a first novel by an unknown author, because I've learned to trust their editor's taste. If they publish it, it's a better than even chance I'll like it. Self publishing offers no such assurance. It may be great, or it may be excrement, or it may be something in between, but it hasn't gone through the filter medium of a professional editor. I've read some good self-published work, and more that made it obvious within a couple of pages why it never sold to a regular publisher...
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Dennis