Quote:
Originally Posted by toddos
Reviews, word of mouth, etc will very quickly separate the wheat from the unedited, typo-ridden chaff.
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I'm not sure about that. That used to be the case, when there were relatively few digital texts available. Now, while it's easy to spot typo-ridden dreck, it's not so easy to spot poorly-developed characters and bad plotting; someone has to read the book to figure that out.
Smashwords gets over a hundred new ebooks a day. That's over 3,000 per month. (My quick one-day count of Mar 16 has 130 ebooks; that'd be over 3750 month, even when rounding down a bit.) I think new Kindlebooks are even more numerous; a lot more people know about Amazon as a book publisher than Smashwords.
When there's over 4000 new ebooks available every month, how do you decide which ones are even worth reading the descriptions for? It'd take hours just to wade through the listings of what's available.
I think we're going to need filters--people who tell us what's worth looking at--for a long time. I don't trust traditional Big 6 publishers to be those filters; they've failed to find me many authors I enjoy. But I can see a future for a company whose sole job is reviewing ebooks and putting a stamp of approval on the ones they like, where they're paid by customer subscriptions: for $10/month, you get a list of 100 books that are worth reading. For $15/month, a list of 50 in the genre of your choice.