Quote:
Originally Posted by carld
I was looking at the Kindle store this morning, and sorted them by publishing date and was surprised that there weren't a lot more self-published books there. Although there were a number of classics available elsewhere for free, most were good solid books. Also some of the apparently self-published books actually looked interesting.
I've read though that you can't preview the self-published books by reading the first chapter, that's disappointing if true.
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How do you know which books are self-published? There are numerous "vanity presses" who do ebooks, like Xlibris, FirstBooks, iUniverse (actually i believe FirstBooks renamed themselves iUniverse to try to avoid detection as a vanity press). These companies take a fee, usually a few hundred dollars, to accept any book no matter how bad, then put those books through the major ebook feeds.
The titles may look very interesting. But your interest soon dissipates as you find the writing is pure gibberish with 2 to 5 spelling errors on each and every page. I'm not saying every single one is like that, but I have investigated some of these books and a goodly percentage really are that bad.