Quote:
Originally Posted by MrsJoseph
I don't own a kindle and I don't buy ebooks from Amazon...but sometimes I wonder what the point is of not owning a kindle. A lot of authors are going exclusive; Amazon has a lot of other exclusive materials; they have a lending library... The list goes on and on. I want competition in publishing - it makes my life better - but sometimes I just want to give in and allow myself to be assimilated.
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This makes 2 of us. Occasionally I, too, get the urge to say the heck with it and give in, but I suspect I will be one of the last to do so because I do worry about competition.
I come from this from a different perspective. When I first began my editing career, most of the larger publishers were family owned or small corporations. There was pride in the product and rigorous editing standards were maintained.
Over the years, these publishers were bought by mega corporations and it wasn't long before what mattered was the quarterly return, not the quality of the work, and editing was the first to suffer because it is essentially invisible. You can see the ink and paper use, the cover design, and the like, but editing is invisible. So the bean counters cut editing budgets and continue to do so. They could do so because competition was decreased. We went from 100 significant publishing houses to 6.