Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Do you think that the number of well-written books has increased? I rather get the impressiom that it's simply the amount of dross that's massively increased, and that won't necessarily have much effect on what people are willing to pay for decent books.
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Sturgeon's Law runs both ways: if 90% of everything is crap and the size of everything grows then it follows that the absolute number of non-crap items has grown.
The Kindle store is up to 4M ebooks, give or take a few hundred K.
And it is growing by some 300,000 indie titles alone each year, according to a recent report.
(And some 100k tradpub titles a year.)
There's bound to be at least a few that are objectively good. Statistically, you'd expect about 30,000 new good books a year from Indies alone.
Of course, since one person's treasure is another's junk the number of books considered subjectively "good" by somebody will be much larger and a function of the total number of buyers. (Fuzzy borders.)
I'd be willing to make a case that, across all genres, the fraction of books considered not-crap by enough people to be objectively non-crap is probably closer to 25% than to 10%. But even at the lower rate (or even half that) that is still a honking lot of new good books hitting the market.
