Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
You're partially correct.
Baen is the only publisher from whom I buy books "sight unseen", knowing nothing about them. I buy every one of their "monthly bundles" not knowing what's in it. Ie I trust Baen to deliver me a good package of four new books every month, which may be authors I'm familiar with, or they may be authors entirely new to me.
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While Baen is my favorite publisher these days, I can't go quite as far as you do. There's been at least one, in each bundle I've ordered from them, that I found to be a total waste of effort.
While I've discovered a number of authors in their catalog who now number among my favorites, I've also found several that I dislike so strongly that I refuse to even read their blurbs. The traditional publishing houses don't serve as gatekeepers for me. The major advantage I see to dealing with them is that,
if you can get accepted and produce acceptable (to them) sales with your first effort, then you have entree to all the major marketplaces with no additional effort on your part.
Of course, you approach that with outlets such as Smashwords, but then you suffer from a general belief that all their titles are crap. Sturgeon was right, of course, that this is true of 90% of everything -- but in marketing, perception is critical, and many folk
do trust traditional publishers as gatekeepers.
As for the original question, I'd agree that an "ebook" is simply any book, of any size, that's available via electronics. Subject matter, format, even the source, are not relevant to the definition.