[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by carandol

Well, not directly, it's been something I've been thinking about for a while. The trend for self-publishing in ebook format is much more common in the role-playing game industry than it is at present in fiction publishing, but I can see it could go that way with fiction too. And as a reader, I don't really want to be wading through the virtual slush-pile looking for a good novel. I know enough people who have to do that for a living and there really is some excruciating stuff out there. We could easily be swamped with appalling Lord of the Rings rip-offs written by overenthusiastic and undertalented 16-year-olds. I mean, are you familiar with The Eye of Argon?

Ghu, yes. One of the occasional party games in my circles is to see how much of it you can read with a straight face.

The problem with self-publishing is an aspect of something I've commented about here in other threads. Back in the late 60's, SF writer Norman Spinrad thought there ought to be enough SF magazines in existance that everyone could get published. My thought at the time was "That's nice. Who will read it?" Now, with the Internet, everyone can get published. I still have the same question.

While people have various complaints against major publishers, they do perform a critical function: they're a filter. Getting published by a regular publisher is no guarantee of goodness, but it's at least less likely to be mind-numbingly bad. Publishers make their living selling books, and at least try to pick books that can sell.

Plus, like I said, there are all these "classics" returning from obscurity. And I look at the tens of thousands of books on Gutenberg and wonder how many of these are actually unjustly neglected classics, and how many went out of print because they weren't actually very good, and are only of interest to an occasional academic.

That's both the strength and the weakness of PG. It's volunteer labor, so what you see is what people wanted to work on. I do wonder at the enthusiasm for things like "Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Annual Meeting" (of which there are now three volumes at PG), but obviously, someone cares enough to do them.

Reviews of the good stuff and occasional dire warnings of things to stay away from would be worth having.

I'll propose a friendly amendment to the original suggestion.

This is MobileRead, concerned with electronic literature and the technologies that make it possible. We are now at four thousand volumes and counting of works from the public domain or from Creative Commons licensed materials that have been uploaded here as carefully crafted editions in the most popular electronic formats, with steadily increasing craftsmanship as our contributors grow more skilled with the tools they use to create the uploads.

I'd like to see some reviews of those. Folks here cared enough to to create those editions. Why? What did they see as meriting their time and effort, and why might we wish to download and read them?
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Dennis