Quote:
Originally Posted by Justin Nemo
Sorry, but how did people manage before ebooks came along? There has always been good quality writing and there has always been dross. Most of the people I know (and I'm not saying this is the same for the whole world) buy books because a friend or family member has recommended it.
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As rhadin mentioned, large professional publishing houses served as gatekeepers. They needed to spend a lot of money to get a book on bookstore shelves, and they had to maintain a reputation of quality, so much of the worst stuff never got past the first assistant editor it encountered, and the rest was proofed and copy-edited and rewritten.
People could assume, usually correctly, that the stuff on their bookstore and library shelves, which was really all they had to choose from, had gone through a filter that left only stuff that wasn't patently terrible.
On the down side, that also left a lot of good stuff out if it did't strike the fancy of a small cadre of professionals.