>"First, I have a collection of unread books sitting in a folder called “eBooks” on my computer. I want to read these books, and learn from them. But instead of

>"First, I have a collection of unread books sitting in a folder called “eBooks” on my computer. I want to read these books, and learn from them. But instead of reading books regularly, when I sit down with my tablet I end up reading Zite, Flipboard, and Instapaper." This is much more a problem with individual habit than publishing. I saw someone use a perfect term for this - infosugar - the equivalent of reaching for a handful of Doritos and a swig of Mountain Dew multiple times a day instead of making a meal of a book. Personally, I just uninstalled all those apps. >"Second, it’s hard to know which books are good. Because most self-published books aren’t listed on a marketplace like Amazon (where user reviews abound), it’s difficult to get a good sense of whether I would enjoy a given book." I'm sure an Amazon listing facilitates collecting reviews, but even then there's an awful lot of material on Amazon with few, if any reviews. At a glance, 25-50% of any given category or search has reviews <= 1. I think the answer here is simply for self-publishers to make more of each book available to browse online. I'm far more likely to buy a book if I thumb through it (literally or virtually) beforehand. In my experience, self-publishers are often terrible about this as they provide perhaps a fragment of a chapter and sometimes nothing more than a table of contents alongside a premium price. Ideally, I think there would be at least a substantial fraction of the book online to browse. Unless you're selling the promise of "secrets" or whatever there's probably nothing to fear, cheapskates aren't going to pay regardless. >"We need our own book club." I like book clubs, but I really have to wonder about one which sounds like it would be a pretty damn self-referential. How do you deal with honest reviewing and priority of titles when both the reviewers and authors are part of the same reputation economy?