6 ms·

>A part of me welcomes this. I am sick of the noise. Browsing the Amazon (Kindle) bookstore, I wish that 90% of the junk didn't even appear in my search results

>A part of me welcomes this. I am sick of the noise. Browsing the Amazon (Kindle) bookstore, I wish that 90% of the junk didn't even appear in my search results. >Rather read works by people who are creating for the sake of art, and not money. What does that have to do with the low quality of many self-published works? There is tons of fiction out there written entirely for 'art' and it is nearly all complete trash. There is so much trash on Amazon because they are killing publishers who traditionally filtered out most of the trash. For every crappy bestseller they published the publishers weeded out tens of thousands of other crappy works. Crappy authors will still write, even if only for public praise (some people do like rubbish).

vixen99 12y ago
I can't see this as a problem. Let the market decide. Probably my treasured reading is your rubbish and just possibly, vice versa.
- Perdition 12y ago
  The problem is that nobody has come up with a good way to filter through the self-published dross to find the gold. Without the publishers filtering you can't just pick a book at random and be ensured it probably won't make you want to claw your eyes out (at least publishers would clean up the major spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and incoherent plots). So what is left is popularity, and as already established that doesn't stop shitty authors writing books. Peer recommendations are a real crap-shoot unless you have vetted your peers thoroughly, which takes time. Whoever can build out an automated system to rank and recommend self-published books will make a fortune.
  - nikbackm 12y ago
    Wouldn't a system like Goodreads be a good start for that?
    - Perdition 12y ago
      I don't see how it is better than Amazon reviews. Reader reviews are okay for the best sellers if you read a lot of reviews (but I find it tends to heavily skew towards those who loved the book, with a handful of haters), but I find it is pretty much worthless when it comes to average books which only have a handful of reviews. I'm thinking of a more objective system. It could be based on reader reviews but would need to do something like making the review rank the book on a a set of criteria and then figuring out if the reviewer is trustworthy by cross comparison. eHarmony for books.
    - HelloMcFly 12y ago
      As a regular Goodreads user, I've found that it definitely hasn't been a good start thus far.
      - wutbrodo 12y ago
        Wow really? My reaction to new social networks (even niche ones) is usually somewhere between apathy and irritation, but back in 2010 I remember being excited about Goodreads because I saw actual value there: it just make the system of book recommendations that I already rely on that much more efficient. It took until 2012 for it to suddenly gain popularity and for me to gain a critical mass of friends whose taste I trust on the service, but I get heaps of value out of it now.
        HelloMcFly 12y ago
        Two thoughts on that: 1) You are using it in a way that I'm not able to. For you it is a tool that leverages pre-existing relationships, which I'm sure is great. I know about four people that use Goodreads, and their tastes just don't align to me. And unfortunately for me, the stand-alone recommendation service Goodreads offers that people like me try to rely on is just terrible. 2) Even if I had a critical mass of friends making recommendations, they themselves identified the books they should read somewhere. Yes, we can all socially recommend books we like for awhile, but eventually someone has to start separating the wheat from the chaff to start making those recommendations. Books are not movies or songs, and it's much more time-consuming to do this en masse. I don't trust Goodreads to facilitate upstream discovery (that can leveraged downstream via social recommendations) in a publisher-less world primarily populated by self-published books.
  - icelancer 12y ago
    >The problem is that nobody has come up with a good way to filter through the self-published dross to find the gold. If you self-publish without doing an ounce of marketing through curation of an audience, then your book falls under the "vanity publishing" sphere. Then why should anyone care if your work is good? You clearly didn't do a good enough job of selling it. (Note that publishers don't do anything for first time authors in this regard, either.)

vixen99 12y ago

I can't see this as a problem. Let the market decide. Probably my treasured reading is your rubbish and just possibly, vice versa.

Perdition 12y ago
The problem is that nobody has come up with a good way to filter through the self-published dross to find the gold. Without the publishers filtering you can't just pick a book at random and be ensured it probably won't make you want to claw your eyes out (at least publishers would clean up the major spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and incoherent plots). So what is left is popularity, and as already established that doesn't stop shitty authors writing books. Peer recommendations are a real crap-shoot unless you have vetted your peers thoroughly, which takes time. Whoever can build out an automated system to rank and recommend self-published books will make a fortune.
- nikbackm 12y ago
  Wouldn't a system like Goodreads be a good start for that?
  - Perdition 12y ago
    I don't see how it is better than Amazon reviews. Reader reviews are okay for the best sellers if you read a lot of reviews (but I find it tends to heavily skew towards those who loved the book, with a handful of haters), but I find it is pretty much worthless when it comes to average books which only have a handful of reviews. I'm thinking of a more objective system. It could be based on reader reviews but would need to do something like making the review rank the book on a a set of criteria and then figuring out if the reviewer is trustworthy by cross comparison. eHarmony for books.
  - HelloMcFly 12y ago
    As a regular Goodreads user, I've found that it definitely hasn't been a good start thus far.
    - wutbrodo 12y ago
      Wow really? My reaction to new social networks (even niche ones) is usually somewhere between apathy and irritation, but back in 2010 I remember being excited about Goodreads because I saw actual value there: it just make the system of book recommendations that I already rely on that much more efficient. It took until 2012 for it to suddenly gain popularity and for me to gain a critical mass of friends whose taste I trust on the service, but I get heaps of value out of it now.
      - HelloMcFly 12y ago
        Two thoughts on that: 1) You are using it in a way that I'm not able to. For you it is a tool that leverages pre-existing relationships, which I'm sure is great. I know about four people that use Goodreads, and their tastes just don't align to me. And unfortunately for me, the stand-alone recommendation service Goodreads offers that people like me try to rely on is just terrible. 2) Even if I had a critical mass of friends making recommendations, they themselves identified the books they should read somewhere. Yes, we can all socially recommend books we like for awhile, but eventually someone has to start separating the wheat from the chaff to start making those recommendations. Books are not movies or songs, and it's much more time-consuming to do this en masse. I don't trust Goodreads to facilitate upstream discovery (that can leveraged downstream via social recommendations) in a publisher-less world primarily populated by self-published books.
- icelancer 12y ago
  >The problem is that nobody has come up with a good way to filter through the self-published dross to find the gold. If you self-publish without doing an ounce of marketing through curation of an audience, then your book falls under the "vanity publishing" sphere. Then why should anyone care if your work is good? You clearly didn't do a good enough job of selling it. (Note that publishers don't do anything for first time authors in this regard, either.)