Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The primary thing that publishers bring to the table is filtering out the garbage, and editing those few books that are worthy of publication such that they become readable. Alas, you only have to look at the overwhelming majority of books by independent authors to see the result of not using a professional editor.
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As others have already said, the editing can be done without the publishers and I think the position of independent editors or editing bureaus will become more important. And the publishers do quite a lousy job of filtering. Their filtering is based on the profits they think they can make, but if you look at the big number of returns they are not very good at selecting the proper books to publish. Also the customer is not interested in what books will generate profit for the publisher but what books are worth reading, which might be a different category. In the rejected books there might be several ones that are worth reading but with not enough interest in readers to warrant a commercial print run. But still interesting enough for a sufficiently large group of customers to warrant an ebook version, maybe together with a POD version. If it is produced by a low-overhead organisation or by the author it will be worthwhile to publish it. But it might not fit in the large scale bureaucratic mode of operation of a publisher. I think it is inevitable that this kind of publishing will shift away from the publishing houses and their importance will diminish.