Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
Clearly he feels that the avalanche of cheap and free books in the Amazon catalogue is not a good thing long term for the book industry. He seems to want the publishers to do more, not less, to defend the value of books. What do you think of THEM apples?
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It's probably not a good thing for "the book industry," which is several hundred years old, and built in the premise that authors should work at below-minimum-wage for the thin possibility of an award someday maybe, while paper-peddlers get rich off their labor.
The plethora of cheap and free books are great for readers. Great for the authors who are making a living wage off books publishers never would've touched.
Are there *less* mega-star authors now? Is the bestseller pool shrinking? The midlist author possibilities are exploding nicely, and the grade below midlist--what's that called, pulp? Something else? Is becoming financially viable rather than a way to starve slowly unless the author got lucky enough to be discovered by a marketing campaign.
Readers who complain they "can't find the good stuff" are whining about nothing. All the methods they used four years ago--except, perhaps, browsing at Borders--are still available. The NY Times Bestseller list still lists print books that are very popular and many of them are award-winners. A person can limit their reading to Agency publishers and award winners and whatever classics they care for, and have enough to read for the rest of their life.
Readers who are dismayed that the good stuff they recognize is (digitally) shelved right next to $.99 bits of horrific unedited tripe with a pretty cover are... going to have to learn to cope. Complaining that "when I look for books, I now see too many options to remember which are the narrow set I care to consider buying" is just pathetic.
The real complaint is, "I want a bunch of $3 ebooks instead of a $12 ebook but I don't know how to pick four of them that, collectively, I'll enjoy as much or more as I would've enjoyed the $12 ebook." And while I have some sympathy--I've spent time trudging through the digital slushpile--I'm still not seeing how this is "an end to the value of books."
The systems we've accepted as markers of quality and indicators of style-of-content no longer work. We'll have to find new systems, and in the meantime, we'll all be exposed to a variety of literature outside of our preferences, sometimes outside our comfort zones, and possibly outside the confines of grammatical comprehensibility. Oh, woe. We shall be forced to be aware of the *full* range of literary skills of our fellow-man. And aware of how popular some of their ideas are.
This'll be "an end to the book industry" like the mp3 was the end of the music industry. I haven't noticed any shortage of music.