Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
There is no question that anyone who wants to write and publish should be free to do so IF we have a way to build a consensus as to what newly published work is great literature.
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There is no
IF about it.
Anyone who wants to write and publish should be free to do so. Assuming, of course, they have the means -- freedom of the press has always applied to the man who owns a press. The advantage of ebooks is that anyone who has the use of a computer has that means.
I can see someone in Gutenberg's day decrying the loss of monks' control over what was once the domain of the abbey's scriptorium, and saying that writers should only be free to use this new technology if there was some way to decide which of it was worthwhile (in whose opinion?).
It turns out that history, and the opinions of readers throughout that history, have done a fine job of determining what was great literature. I have no reason to believe this will change just because more books are being published. It may be instructive, also, to remember how much of what
we consider "great" was met with disdain (or the bonfire) when it was first written. Even novels themselves were decried as "trash" that distracted people from what they should be reading -- mostly the Greek classics, apparently. It has been neither publishers nor editors who have determined on our behalf that "Tom Sawyer" is a great book while "Tom Sawyer, Detective" is better forgotten. We have determined it -- we, the readers, the writers, the academics, the people with opinions good and bad. That will not change.
There is value to publishers' imprints as a brand name -- see the mention of Baen earlier. If you buy something from Baen, you're getting a known standard of quality. This is something that Web users are becoming accustomed to in many ways. For example, if you read game review websites, you differentiate between those that just reprint the publisher's media packet and those that have their own opinions and aren't afraid to say that some hyped new game is a waste of money. So that aspect will sort itself out over time. If the market (remember that "free market" thing?) sees a value in a publisher's approval of a book, the publisher will have a purpose. If people outside the current corporate publishing system provide an equal or better means for the prospective buyer to evaluate books, then there may indeed be no future for publishers. So it would behoove the publishers, I think, to start working very, very hard on their brand image. Not shoveling un-proofread crap into a PDF and dumping it out the door would be a good first step.