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Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
Interesting perspective. To my view, the gatekeepers are still in business, however struggling, and Amazon is essentially setting itself up as another gatekeeper (hey, they're not going to publish everything they're offered--there will be filters).
So the Kindle Store will eventually be seen as even more of a slush pile than it is considered now.
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One person's junk is another's treasure.
And there is no reason why *readers* can't be the gatekeepers in the post-treeware era. Let them vote with their wallets. They can hardly do worse than the lords of print have done over the past few decades.
It won't be just the Kindle store hosting a flood of new content; it'll be everybody in the biz.
Remember that ebooks don't go out of print so new releases will be competing for attention side by side with every book ever published. Back in the day, Borders made hay off a 30,000 book catalog while today Amazon stocks over 900000, plus another milion-plus pd titles and Google claims over 3 million.
Even applying Sturgeon's law, the supply of quality content is running a couple orders of magnitude higher than in the traditional gatekeeper era. No amount of bottlenecking, filtering, or gatekeeping is going to change that. What is going to change--what has already started to change--is how people find and buy books and just as the production and distribution of books is changing, so to is the way consumers look at books.
Over in the baseball world, there are stories of cuban defectos, newly-minted millionaires, walking into north american supermarkets and retail shops and literally becoming paralized at having to choose what to buy, overwhelmed by the range of choices and unable to discriminate. But, not surprisingly, they quickly adapt and over a period of a few months learn the required skills to survive in an economy of abundance. So too will post-treeware book buyers adapt; the human brain is nothing if not adaptive.
And, even in the unlikely event that the current breed of reader isn't up to the task, the newer generations will. Think of it as evolution in action.
(With apologies to Niven and Pournelle.)