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Traditional publishers are worthless when it comes to e-books that the author can market himself. Distribution is taken care of so only marketing/advertising is

Traditional publishers are worthless when it comes to e-books that the author can market himself. Distribution is taken care of so only marketing/advertising is left and that can also be taken care of by a competent author. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

gabemart 14y ago
I'm really, really interested in the future of content publishing and how things will look fifty years from now. There's a trend across almost all forms of media towards easier, faster, wider and less expensive production and distribution. This is a Good Thing, but it introduces some interesting problems. One of the main roles of traditional publishing is content curation. This seemed less important in the past when it simply seemed a byproduct of media products (books, tv shows, films etc.) being expensive to produce and distribute. But now, it's becoming clearer that curation is going to become a difficult problem to solve when it's trivial for people to publish their own product on the same platform as internationally successful content authors. Sturgeon's law applies. In fact, it applies more now than ever because the minimum bar of quality has been lowered. How are we going to navigate something like the Kindle store as vastly increasing proportions of it become saturated with garbage? I know curation is kind of a buzzword in startup circles at the moment, but it's vastly, vastly important. As a trivial aside, in another tab I'm reading a thread where people recommend the best little-known free software they use. Most of the top replies recommend a single software, most of which I then took a look at. One of them is a list of perhaps 20 softwares; my eyes glazed over and I moved on to the next reply.
- lucian303 14y ago
  You bring up a good point. Curation (filtering) has been quite a huge problem for quite some time. While I do think that traditional publishing houses provided this, they did so at the expense of great writing. So it was far from a perfect system. A lot of crap got and still gets published and a lot of good content doesn't. I wish I had an answer for it. I tend to look at the music scene, specifically electronic, for a relatively successful model: the DJ as filter (curator). I'm not sure that such an equivalent can be achieved with movies let alone books. I do think a lot of it will have to come from self promotion and word of mouth (whether by actual mouth or electronic) will become more and more important. It's already almost impossible to navigate the Kindle store if you don't know what you're looking for and that goes for other similar services (Amazon Prime Streaming, Netflix, Hulu, etc.). For example, Netflix ratings in my experience are pretty decent indicators of the quality of most movies, so for some crowdsourcing the value of media may work. (You need a good algorithm and a large enough data set of rated movies.) Others may choose to go more with suggestions from readers whose taste they trust. What I'd like to see is literary reviews that are accessible to the common reader and that do not assume that you've read the book. This is similar to a lot of the book/movie criticism out there, except for the last clause which is imperative for finding a good book rather than analyzing an already read one.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - gabemart 14y ago
    >Netflix ratings in my experience are pretty decent indicators of the quality of most movies, so for some crowdsourcing the value of media may work. (You need a good algorithm and a large enough data set of rated movies.) Others may choose to go more with suggestions from readers whose taste they trust. This model works pretty well for things like feature-length films and season-long television series because there is a certain lack of accessibility built into the platform. Very few complete amateurs will make a feature-length movie or season-long TV program. If someone completely unskilled in the art attempts either of these things, people will be able to tell extremely quickly that the content is of very low quality. Contrast this to ebooks or (even worse) poetry. A novella- or novel-length ebook is much easier for someone with no ability to complete. Even worse, if they have a basic grasp of written English, it takes much longer to work out that the content is really low quality. Novels take longer to get going, and there's more leeway to assume an author may be intentionally doing something that seems odd for a specific effect later on. Poetry is perhaps the best example of this kind of problem - it's pretty easy for lots of people to dash off some word salad that can pass (at first glance) for modernist poetry. You have to actually give it your attention to see if anything of any sense is going on. The upshot is that crowd-sourced curation works great for forms of media that are hard to produce and popular, because the ratio of consumers/judges to producers/content is favorable. It works pretty badly for forms of media that are easy to produce and less popular, because at some point you end up with more content than consumers willing to try it, especially seeing as the average quality is so low.

gabemart 14y ago

I'm really, really interested in the future of content publishing and how things will look fifty years from now. There's a trend across almost all forms of media towards easier, faster, wider and less expensive production and distribution. This is a Good Thing, but it introduces some interesting problems. One of the main roles of traditional publishing is content curation. This seemed less important in the past when it simply seemed a byproduct of media products (books, tv shows, films etc.) being expensive to produce and distribute. But now, it's becoming clearer that curation is going to become a difficult problem to solve when it's trivial for people to publish their own product on the same platform as internationally successful content authors. Sturgeon's law applies. In fact, it applies more now than ever because the minimum bar of quality has been lowered. How are we going to navigate something like the Kindle store as vastly increasing proportions of it become saturated with garbage? I know curation is kind of a buzzword in startup circles at the moment, but it's vastly, vastly important. As a trivial aside, in another tab I'm reading a thread where people recommend the best little-known free software they use. Most of the top replies recommend a single software, most of which I then took a look at. One of them is a list of perhaps 20 softwares; my eyes glazed over and I moved on to the next reply.

lucian303 14y ago
You bring up a good point. Curation (filtering) has been quite a huge problem for quite some time. While I do think that traditional publishing houses provided this, they did so at the expense of great writing. So it was far from a perfect system. A lot of crap got and still gets published and a lot of good content doesn't. I wish I had an answer for it. I tend to look at the music scene, specifically electronic, for a relatively successful model: the DJ as filter (curator). I'm not sure that such an equivalent can be achieved with movies let alone books. I do think a lot of it will have to come from self promotion and word of mouth (whether by actual mouth or electronic) will become more and more important. It's already almost impossible to navigate the Kindle store if you don't know what you're looking for and that goes for other similar services (Amazon Prime Streaming, Netflix, Hulu, etc.). For example, Netflix ratings in my experience are pretty decent indicators of the quality of most movies, so for some crowdsourcing the value of media may work. (You need a good algorithm and a large enough data set of rated movies.) Others may choose to go more with suggestions from readers whose taste they trust. What I'd like to see is literary reviews that are accessible to the common reader and that do not assume that you've read the book. This is similar to a lot of the book/movie criticism out there, except for the last clause which is imperative for finding a good book rather than analyzing an already read one.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- gabemart 14y ago
  >Netflix ratings in my experience are pretty decent indicators of the quality of most movies, so for some crowdsourcing the value of media may work. (You need a good algorithm and a large enough data set of rated movies.) Others may choose to go more with suggestions from readers whose taste they trust. This model works pretty well for things like feature-length films and season-long television series because there is a certain lack of accessibility built into the platform. Very few complete amateurs will make a feature-length movie or season-long TV program. If someone completely unskilled in the art attempts either of these things, people will be able to tell extremely quickly that the content is of very low quality. Contrast this to ebooks or (even worse) poetry. A novella- or novel-length ebook is much easier for someone with no ability to complete. Even worse, if they have a basic grasp of written English, it takes much longer to work out that the content is really low quality. Novels take longer to get going, and there's more leeway to assume an author may be intentionally doing something that seems odd for a specific effect later on. Poetry is perhaps the best example of this kind of problem - it's pretty easy for lots of people to dash off some word salad that can pass (at first glance) for modernist poetry. You have to actually give it your attention to see if anything of any sense is going on. The upshot is that crowd-sourced curation works great for forms of media that are hard to produce and popular, because the ratio of consumers/judges to producers/content is favorable. It works pretty badly for forms of media that are easy to produce and less popular, because at some point you end up with more content than consumers willing to try it, especially seeing as the average quality is so low.