Quote:
Originally Posted by netscorer
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I think that if authors can post their books on open portals, more people may notice them and start encouraging them to produce better works. Very few aspiring writers dream right away of earning money from their work. Most simply want the recognition of their talent, want to bring their ideas to the world around them and going through the publishing house sieve may be too difficult a test to pass by the starting author.
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This whole notion of a new world order for authors and literature without publishers has a couple of stumbling blocks to overcome before it will be viable:
1) of all the book readers I know, even among the computer-literate among my circle of acquaintances, friends and relatives, I am the ONLY person reading my books electronically. Everybody else prefers paper and wouldn't be on-line searching, so that would drastically cut the number of people in the marketplace for books;
2) with all the possible author web-sites, it will be ever more difficult to be sure to find new authors one might be interested in. No-one will know whether a link appearing in Google when they're searching for "mystery novels" (for example) will contain crap or excellence, and life is way too short to be able to seek out all possible good literature. And with anybody being able to put their own work up on web-sites with no vetting as to quality or readability, the world of literature, should it try to follow this new world order, will be in total disarray for a while until entrepreneurs figure out how to develop their portals and advertise their portals as having only quality literature -- this will simply result in new electronic "publishers" which will need to make a profit to keep their portals up and to be able to have the time to filter the crap from the gold, and will need editors to help the unpolished gems develop into lustrous wonders we'll all want to read. We'll end up with publishers just as we have them now, they'll just have a different name but they'll still add their profit to the cost of the literature;
3) many (most?) of the current authors are not all that keen on ebooks -- I've contacted all my current favorite authors to encourage them to get their books on the Connect ebookstore and several have said they have no interest at all in doing it, and most have said something to the effect of "Wow, maybe I'll have to look into it" and NONE of them have said "Thank you for showing me this great new marketplace, I'll get my publisher to put all my books there at once!" The book world is very old-fashioned, so it'll take some time before authors will all get on the ebook bandwagon.
In the meantime, publishers, as always, will remain a necessary "evil" in the world of books, either paper or electronic.