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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
It would be great if something like Smashwords had that, geared to indie ebooks -- with quality as one of the parameters.
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It'd be great if Smashwords had a "sort by price" option. Or "people who bought this also bought." Or even just "sort by word count" or "list in alpha order by author, not by most recently added."
Much as I'd love Smashwords to get a review/rec-based sorting system, it needs much more basic filtering software.
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Actually, I'd pay for that. Let's say it added 50 cents to the price of an ebook, that going to pay for the recommendation engine -- I'd pay that without a second thought, if it was as good as Amazon's system, which is basically dead on. It's worth that to me to find good ebooks I want to read.
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That's what I mean. Not that the specifics are important, but that plenty of us would be willing to pay money for "find me stuff I'd probably like to read," if it was actually based on criteria that mattered to us. (Do not care what books are bestsellers on NYTimes reading lists. Do not care for how many stars it's got at Amazon; a good ranking may tell me it's not atrocious, but that'd miss out on the good books that just haven't been reviewed yet. And so on.)
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but then again, if something was rated high quality (the higher the quality, the more reading would be required; you can spot suck pretty quickly) its sales would probably skyrocket, which could be a win all around -- not least in encouraging authors to produce higher-quality ebooks.
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Yep. I think a lot of traditional publisher functions are going to split off and become separate businesses--editing, proofreading, formatting, and bookcover design can already be hired out to different people or groups; why not the nebulous function of "this is worth reading if you like this genre?"
I know I can enjoy anything Baen publishes. Not all of it's going to be my favorites, and there might be the occasional book that hits me just wrong for personal reasons (cf OH JOHN RINGO NO), but I can count on them to produce content of interest to me. I wouldn't mind if a non-publisher person/company set up a business that said, "we find indie ebooks within [target range] and make lists of them, with descriptions." If [target range] is relevant to my interests, I'd be willing to pay for that.