[deviant]

Originally Posted by HarryT

No, it is you who are confused. The end result of using a publisher is better quality books; that is of direct benefit to the reader. I don't want to read books full of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, which is what we'd get "raw" from most authors.

I don't want to know what kind of author sends his work to publishers with spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. After all, if you're a writer, you should at least be able to, well, write.

I write physics textbooks. No university in the world is going to use a textbook for a course unless they know that it's been published by a reputable publisher who's subjected the information in it to a proper peer review. How is this process going to work without publishers?

My professors usually review their books before using them for their courses, regardless of what kind of reviews it got. Need I say that most students don't care about the textbook as long as it's cheap?

You do it, many of us here do it, too, but the majority won't. Ereaders are still some nerd gadgets. They are not widely advertised, not prominently featured in the media and are hard to find in any physical shop. They are niche products. DRM on the other hand is not an issue for most people. But it is in the music business, because there DRM protected files are much less easy to use. An exception is the iPod and iTunes. And guess what - both sell big time.

I remember trying to get my college to move from paper books to e-readers. Since buying a e-reader was so expensive, I was thinking of getting a few friends and getting a discount. We were offered a 15% discount for purchases over 50 units. The sad part? We could have ordered as many as 300 units ordered but the discount would still be only 15% which didn't make the wide adoption plan look too realistic. So it's not so much of a niche market as much as the producers basing their business plan around profit rather than wider adoption.

Wikipedia the one prevails who is online longer than others and drives his agenda more aggressively than others. This is especially true for political topics. Truth is not democratic. And on Wikipedia not even everybody has the same voting power (others are online longer than you are, can edit more articles, don't have to earn money for themselves like you do, and so on). When truth is determined democratically, it is for sure a big fat lie.

I take all history I read, regardless of the source, with a solid grain of salt. It wouldn't be the first time somebody used history for their own purposes.