People who want no DRM are impractical dreamers...

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

It would be great if something like Smashwords had that, geared to indie ebooks -- with quality as one of the parameters.

It'd be great if Smashwords had a "sort by price" option. Or "people who bought this also bought." Or even just "sort by word count" or "list in alpha order by author, not by most recently added."

Much as I'd love Smashwords to get a review/rec-based sorting system, it needs much more basic filtering software.

Actually, I'd pay for that. Let's say it added 50 cents to the price of an ebook, that going to pay for the recommendation engine -- I'd pay that without a second thought, if it was as good as Amazon's system, which is basically dead on. It's worth that to me to find good ebooks I want to read.

That's what I mean. Not that the specifics are important, but that plenty of us would be willing to pay money for "find me stuff I'd probably like to read," if it was actually based on criteria that mattered to us. (Do not care what books are bestsellers on NYTimes reading lists. Do not care for how many stars it's got at Amazon; a good ranking may tell me it's not atrocious, but that'd miss out on the good books that just haven't been reviewed yet. And so on.)

but then again, if something was rated high quality (the higher the quality, the more reading would be required; you can spot suck pretty quickly) its sales would probably skyrocket, which could be a win all around -- not least in encouraging authors to produce higher-quality ebooks.

Yep. I think a lot of traditional publisher functions are going to split off and become separate businesses--editing, proofreading, formatting, and bookcover design can already be hired out to different people or groups; why not the nebulous function of "this is worth reading if you like this genre?"

I know I can enjoy anything Baen publishes. Not all of it's going to be my favorites, and there might be the occasional book that hits me just wrong for personal reasons (cf OH JOHN RINGO NO), but I can count on them to produce content of interest to me. I wouldn't mind if a non-publisher person/company set up a business that said, "we find indie ebooks within [target range] and make lists of them, with descriptions." If [target range] is relevant to my interests, I'd be willing to pay for that.

[rogue_librarian]

Originally Posted by bhartman36

All you can do is make it a little harder.

Yes, and piss of many of your legitimate customers in the process. Way to go!

If I could transfer an e-book to whichever device I wanted, regardless of the vendor, why would I give a rip about DRM?

Because I like to edit the file sometimes, e.g. fix a few typos, replace the 2 MB .bmp cover with something more sensible (so it loads faster on my reader), things like that. I'm sure there are many more equally valid reasons.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Catlady

You originally seemed to be advocating the extinction of the major publishers in favor of self-publishing-with-filters; now you're talking about niche publishing that can coexist with major publishers.

I'm expecting the extinction of the major publishers and looking for what will replace their useful functions. I think that, in the long run, their current business model is doomed; it was predicated on having a stranglehold on some aspects of the marketplace. While they still have that in some areas--many bookstores won't carry indie books, or won't carry them next to mainstream publishers--in other areas, notably online sales, they don't set the terms anymore.

And I think more and more authors will forgo the advantages of placement in physical bookstores for control of their books and profits, since those now have a solid chance of being just as good or better without the publisher.

Fine, if the self-publishers want to attempt to create some order and meet certain standards to tap their potential markets. They would, in effect, be banding together create an entity that would act like a clearinghouse.

I wasn't talking about self-publishers banding together; I was considering a third party stepping in to cover that aspect--one that had no direct stake in the books, but a stake in pleasing the customers who'd buy the books. As it stands, publishers have a stake in convincing you everything they publish is high-quality and worth buying, regardless of actual quality; a third-party agency would only have a stake in convincing you its recommendations were valuable--it'd be free to ignore the occasional badly-edited dud from otherwise good authors. And it could say, "sorry; books 1-3 of this series were excellent, but then the author seems to have lost whatever spark made those work."

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Clearly, proper respect for everyone who toils to bring you your book should include not buying ebooks at all, so that you can properly support the hundreds of people from the nursery worker who sprouts the seed that will become the tree your paper came from to the store clerk who puts the finished book in a bag and hands it across the counter. How dare you not care about all of them, and all of their jobs? They're important, you know! And you're admitting you don't care about any of them, and just want a book?

Speaking of the people behind the paper book, did we know that when we bought digital cameras that we'd be singing the death knoll for the 35mm film? Well, we did and it's now dead. So, please buy more eBooks and help kill off the pBook. If the pBook is what's causing the agency model because the publishers don't want hardcover sales to suffer, let's help kill off the paper books and make eBooks reasonably priced once again.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Piper_

qft

Whenever I see these publisher apologetics doing their thing, the PR person in me just... <facepalm>

Are there no voices of wisdom in this industry? No one who realizes the folly in setting themselves up as antagonistic to their customers? Are the smart people in publishing just being ignored?

I don't know.

I do know this: As long as I see publishers continue doing such things as

• - Disabling TTS (by means of drm)
  
• - Disallowing even the most restrictive of lending features. Seriously - this isn't just a matter of, "DRM is needed to keep people from casually using facebook to spread to hundreds or thousands of people."
  They also think a one-time only, 14 day, exclusive-use lending of a book in its lifetime is too much.
  
• - Blowing off the simplest of error-checking and inclusion of important images, like maps
  
• - Insulting us or our intelligence in confrontations

Well, I'm usually a pretty soft heart, but yeesh, I'm having a very hard time scraping up anything like trust or benevolence toward them.

You left out covers. Most eBooks have some nasty looking generic cover.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Speaking of the people behind the paper book, did we know that when we bought digital cameras that we'd be singing the death knoll for the 35mm film? Well, we did and it's now dead. So, please buy more eBooks and help kill off the pBook. If the pBook is what's causing the agency model because the publishers don't want hardcover sales to suffer, let's help kill off the paper books and make eBooks reasonably priced once again.

Death-of-pbooks is a lot farther away. Cameras were always a high-tech mostly-luxury item; books haven't been that for more than a hundred years.
The places on this map of the earth at night that are dark is where ebooks won't be taking over anytime soon. Like, not likely in the next century. And yes, pbook sales in a lot of those areas are pretty low--but not nonexistent, unlike camera sales in most of those areas.

Professional and semi-pro photographers always had an interest in manipulating/editing the pictures. One of the reasons digital cameras took off is that the pictures themselves could be manipulated a lot easier than film; editing ebooks, other than fixing bad formatting or metadata, is rare. There's no great incentive for most book-buyers to move to digital books, not the way there was for camera-users to move to digital photographs.

[bhartman36]

Originally Posted by rogue_librarian

Yes, and piss of many of your legitimate customers in the process. Way to go!

Well, depending on how you do it, the customers wouldn't have to be pissed off. That's sort of what I was getting at.

Originally Posted by rogue_librarian

Because I like to edit the file sometimes, e.g. fix a few typos, replace the 2 MB .bmp cover with something more sensible (so it loads faster on my reader), things like that. I'm sure there are many more equally valid reasons.

You're talking here about editing the content of an e-book. This would be beyond the capability of most people even with non-DRM'ed e-books sold in typical e-book formats today. Hell, most people aren't even going to know how to edit an HTML file. I'm not saying it's not a legitimate concern. But it's not an issue that 99% of the public is going to care about, so I don't think the publishers would ever make that trade-off. I'm guessing most people seeing a typo are going to think to themselves, "Oh, look. A typo. What a dumbass." They're not going to think, "Oh, look. A typo. I'd better fix that." I can see the desire to either include a fancy book cover or not, but that can be handled in different editions, rather than needing to strip DRM.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I wasn't talking about self-publishers banding together; I was considering a third party stepping in to cover that aspect--one that had no direct stake in the books, but a stake in pleasing the customers who'd buy the books.

I think what you're talking about is an agent -- in the market sense, that is, not the publishing sense. That would be an entity that searches out things that match certain criteria of yours.

For example, if the guy at your local comic book store knows you want to subscribe to any new series by a certain writer or artist, and automatically puts them in your bag for the next time you come in, he's acting as your agent. You have a set of criteria, and he's acting on anything that matches. For that matter, if you shop at a certain store because you know they usually have shoes in your size, or flowers that will do well in your garden, or tools that you want, they're in a sense an agent, though a somewhat more diffuse one. They're enabling you to make your choice of shoes, let's say, from the ones they have in the store -- the ones that will probably meet your needs, because they're a specialty store that has your kind of shoes -- rather than having to sort through all of the tens of thousands of styles of shoes on the market.

That's a role book publishers, and to an even greater extent imprints, have filled in the past. For example, if you want moderately hard SF, often with a military bent, you want Baen. If you want soft formula romance, you buy Harlequin. Etc. But with the splitting apart of publishers' responsibilities -- they're dropping the marketing and editing parts like hot potatoes, and without those, more and more new authors are going to wonder what they actually are getting -- there's no reason for that "agent" role to remain with the publisher, either. Amazon's recommendation system -- an automated buyer's agent -- doesn't care what publisher a book actually comes from, only whether it matches whatever criteria are set up in there somewhere for "books WW will likely buy".

Incidentally, responsiveness to the customer's needs, not the marketer's, is critical. I haven't used Amazon's recommendations much lately, because someone at Amazon has decided that although my lifetime hardcover purchases from them total approximately five, they're going to recommend HC's to the exclusion of all else, because they make more money from them. This makes me wonder how much money they think they're making from a book I'm not buying. If the system went back to recommending MM paperbacks, which I do buy, and buy a lot of (they just need to check their sales records) I'd go back to using it all the time. Recommending what you want to sell doesn't work; that just loses you customers. You need to recommend what the customer wants to buy, which is why I'm suggesting buyers' agents separate from the actual sellers of the book -- someone/something that gets exactly the same payment if I buy a HC that came out last week or a MM that came out last decade.

I have no difficulty at all envisioning agents like that becoming common. They've been talked about for years, but in the past they haven't really had a pressing need to fulfill. With the dramatic rise of indie publishing, their time may have come.

Look, again, at the people who subscribe to Consumer Reports -- either the printed magazine or the website. That's their agent: someone who goes out and tests all those microwaves so they don't have to. I like reading books. I like finding new authors. Long before I'd subscribe to a microwave review website, I'd subscribe to one that goes out and finds those books for me so I don't have to. And, naturally, like its Amazon kindred, it would get better with time. Like, don't like, bought, don't want ... all would factor into fine-tuning its results. There's a role for that, and I'll be in line to subscribe at the site that best matches my interests.

[Lemurion]

People get into the industry - at least at the lower levels - because they love books. That holds true of the publishers I've met and I've met a number of them, some pretty high up in their respective companies.

The real issue they face is that most publishing houses are owned (and controlled) by multinationals run by bean-counters who treat books as just another widget. It's the top-level accountants who really force most of the stupidity on things, not the actual publishers.

[kennyc]

This thread topic ties to a posting I made here (rather than duplicate, here's a link):
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...&postcount=115

[JSWolf]

Oh my God! They killed Kennyc. You Bas—no wait! Thank you!

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Oh my God! They killed Kennyc. You Bas—no wait! Thank you!

[snipenekkid]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Oh my God! They killed Kennyc. You Bas—no wait! Thank you!

Originally Posted by kennyc

ya still da man Kenny, wish you weren't killed though, life goes on I suppose.

[bhartman36]

That's not Kenny. It's Mysterion!

[snipenekkid]

Originally Posted by bhartman36

That's not Kenny. It's Mysterion!

d'oh!! you are right!! caught this pair hopping from the rooftops the other night