Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
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.  |
Completely agreeing with your post.
As to the crap, I think it depends more on genre.
I think fiction has less crap than say household or finance or do it yourself or self-help.
My thinking on this is because it is easy to copy and paste in those categories so very little work involved. They get very easy to spot. The grammar usually does not match. Sorry but one is not going to go from broken English to the ideas are perfect English and then back to broken.
Also, the "author's" ideas are usually very well known from someone else. I found one the other day that had literally copied from Stephen Covey, Deepak Chopra, Norman Vincent Peale and assorted others.
It might have been a good book if the author had cleaned up his English and gave credit where credit was due.
And cookbooks are another crap field. It is hard to find a decent independent cookbook.
Now I don't mind the British cookbooks. I have found calculators than can do the conversions for me. I don't mind American cookbooks.
What I do mind is one like this: 120 grams flour, 1 cup sugar, 5 grams salt, 1 tsp baking powder.
Please use one or the other or do this 120 grams/1 cup flour.
Ok crap book rant over.