Ah, but the glory and the tragedy of the Internet isn't that there is *no* gold among the dross, it's that there *is* gold, diamonds even, and we're never, ever going to find it.

Tens of millions of poems, millions of writers, and you think it unlikely any of them meet your standards?

Wow. Talk about refined tastes :-).

Today, people have greater access to writing and greater access to a possible audience.

And yet statistically, we're reading less than we have in the past century.

What you lament is the coming demise of writing and culture is no more than the death of the rock star, or the Shakespeares or Beethovens of the past because their numbers have multiplied through the spread of mass culture.

Not quite, it's the death of 100,000 somewhat notables, replaced by 100,000,000. And that substitution will almost certainly mean that the tens of millions who enjoy reading today will becomes tens of thousands...

I don't deny that those who enjoy fan-fic/amateur market won't be devastated by the loss of the book industry. But that's a niche market in the same way as knitting. Vibrant inside the community, but a niche, and certainly not the cultural force that books have been for centuries.

Well, that's different; people don't read poetry now because no one is writing good poetry anymore.

How would you know?

There are *thousands* of poems written and published on the Internet every day and I've no doubt that some of them are good by whatever standard you choose to measure with. The problem isn't that there aren't good poems out there, it's there's no way of filtering the good poems to make it viable for you to find them.

Exactly the problem I foresee with books.

(Small difference - there are poetry publishers. Unfortunately, their standard of good doesn't really match the general populace's, so effectively, poetry that would reach you and me is all self-published. And to no surprise, we don't bother searching.

That's strange, there's so many sites like metacritic, reddit, and even slashdot that allow people to rate the content they view/read. Too bad this can't be applied to books.

And notice that despite hundreds of thousands of self-published books, it's not occurring now... Ever considered asking why?

Almost nobody is willing to spend 100-200 hours to find a single book worth reviewing. And, sadly, the very few people who might be willing to do so on an occasional basis are completely eclipsed by desperate authors who have friends "review" or purchase reviews or whatever.. (Not that they are necessarily common, but given how few reviews occur, even 1 in 100 authors means false reviews will eclipse real reviews 10 to 1.)

Closing your eyes and pretending that magic Internet pixies will happily do unpleasant work for free isn't working now. Why should it start working in the future?

(And if you are wondering why it works for music, the answer (1) the investment by the reader/listener is vastly smaller for music - I can listen to music for 3 minutes and decide if I like a piece, as opposed to 2-3 hours for a book and (2) much of the discovery occurs in venues where someone else is doing the filtering for the audience. Open mike nights with no filtering are marginal now. Imagine how they'd do if they featured a single unknown band playing for 2 hours... How many would be willing to sit for weeks to hear one band that was actually decent? (And remember, no talking with friends while listening. This music requires your undivided attention.)

Welcome to the challenges of self-publishing. Sadly, there's no magic here.

Indeed, in order to be happy, you must Consume. Consume, Consumer! Consume! I command it! Waste all your money! Consume, Consume, Consume!

There's no purpose to money if it isn't making you happy. Indeed, what *isn't* a waste of money?

And sadly for my heirs, I am not one of those who is made happy simply by seeing a large number just sitting there in my bank account deposit book while I sit on a park bench with a discarded newspaper for company :-).

So, yes. I'll keep consuming books as long as they keep publishing ones that I like and can find.

Oh come on. I got a good laugh out this, and I disagree with his premise.

nospam007, can you name me a dozen self-published authors you read regularly? Half-dozen?

I'm honestly hoping the answer is yes, but I think it's likely the answer is no. (Or you're a heavy fanfic reader, in which case as long as your tastes don't change, you'll do just fine.)

Anyway, my point is that it's not the editing (okay, the editing is really, really useful), it's the acquisitions.

Of a 1,000 books on the slushpile, about 10-20 are what I would call "publishable". i.e. they've got a decent shot at being enjoyable. (Books outside of that range might have an outside shot at being enjoyable, but are essentially part of the "million words of garbage" that each author needs to write just to get good enough at their craft that they have a chance at being successful.)

So, the primary job of the publisher/editor is not so much to refine a book, and to act as the filter. Without them, I'm almost certainly spending at least 10 times as much time to find a book that I enjoy as much as I do now.

And when the enjoyment/time ratio goes that low, I stop reading...

And we see this. There are probably 10-100 thousand books self-published each month. How many new authors from the self-published world make it onto the radar of even a low midlist writer. One a month? Two? And it's not that there's not good stuff out there in the self-publishing world - it's that there's no means of discovering it without reading the hundreds of not-yet-ready-for-publication books that no-one wants to read without being paid for it.

I'd love to see self-publication become a viable option. But better brains than mine have been trying for years, and the best they've come up with is something that's going to be a pale shadow of the size of the current industry, read by a societally insignificant number of readers.

That's why I'm not optimistic for the book industry's future.

Sorry, lost the thread.

With e-books becoming more dominant and less money coming into the industry, the bookstores die (they're already highly marginal now). With bookstores' death, so go the publishers (after all, any established author will make more money from self-publishing and now the *one* (incredibly important) thing the publishers offer - shelf space - is gone).

With publishers gone, we all essentially become slush pile readers. The books are nearly free, but the constraint is *time*, not money, and with the publishers gone, we're now looking at instead of 1 in 10 new books being decent, we're looking at 1 in 1,000. And quite frankly, there's movies and Angry Birds on our e-book readers that have a much higher payoff rate.

Established authors do okay, but the discovery rate of new authors drops like a stone. Sure a handful get discovered each year, but the current book industry discovers thousands each year. (Where discover means they are distinguished enough from the crowd to have a *chance* at success.) As there are fewer and fewer new authors making it (but more and more authors writing for at least a generation while writing is culturally relevant), the signal to noise ratio keeps dropping.

Even worse, businesses realize that while selling books doesn't make much money, selling services to desperate authors makes a killing. If you are browsing to find a new author you know nothing about, Amazon currently shows us the top 1,000 or so books from mainstream publishers, with a few self-published in the mix. At some point, it makes a *lot* more money by showing us the top 1,000 books from the authors willing to pay the most.

And unfortunately, unlike mainstream publishers, who invest in a book not because they love it, but because they believe it will be what you want to read, would-be self-published authors aren't buying advertising based on the books quality, but on their own personal resources.

Amazon, et al. will make a lot of money for decades even as the book market to readers collapse.

Of course, old favorites won't disappear. They'll be a handful of new discoveries each year from self-publishing. Enough that books won't be "dead". But the idea that book reading will become marginal enough that it's cultural significance will essentially be irrelevant.

i.e. like poetry.

The end of reading as culturally relevant is likely inevitable. It won't disappear, but it will become like poetry - practiced by a few, and written by as many people as read it.

The sad part is that the book market as it stands today obviously makes it clear that there is a (somewhat) viable market. Unfortunately, the introduction of the electronic element means that customers would have to accept that they were paying for the content (whose price hasn't changed) rather than the physical book.

The whole $30 for a hardcover, $10 for a paperback was merely the cover story that people used to allow themselves to spend a lot more money to get the content faster. Stripped of that, most would-be customers can't accept the idea of paying $25 for the first year and then $9 for the electronic copies. They need that tangible crutch to give themselves permission to spend.

Of course, other industries have this problem as well. I will happily spend $30 on a program for the PC, but cannot bring myself to spend $10 for the app that does the identical thing because... my brain tells me $10 for the app is simply too much. So I go without and am less happy for it. Multiple this by millions, and you have the book industry.

Your recommendation is one of certain corporate death.

That's exactly the point. Failure is not having a company die. Failure is not making your shareholders a lot of money.

All companies die someday. Most companies, when they see that their success is based on a moribund market segment basically spend everything they've accumulated in years of profitable behaviour and blow it in a futile effort to replicate their success elsewhere.

Any given company may have a 1 in 1,000 chance of success when entering a new market. An established company has perhaps a 10x greater chance of success when entering a completely new market segment. So in other words, they're blowing all their shareholders money for a 1 in 100 chance of success.

They won the lottery once, and then skillfully made those lottery winning even more valuable. Now they're going stake everything on another lottery win? No thanks. Give the shareholders their money, and *if* they want another gamble let them invest in a new company and pray.

The sad fact of the tech stock market is that even if you are lucky enough to back a "winner", you will never see the vast majority of the money the company made - it'll almost certainly be wasted in a vain attempt to assuage the corporate egos that yes, we can do it again. Well, the answer is, 99 of 100 times, no, you can't.

Apple's pretty much the exception to the thousands of companies that tried to reinvent themselves and failed. Thanks, but I think MS's stock holders would be better served by giving the billions that it has and will have for the next decade or two before it's time to wind it up back to its owners.

I'd have no admiration for a billionaire that spent his billions in the last few years of life fruitlessly trying to preserve it, hoping for a miracle. Why should I admire the same in a company?

If they really wanted to do what was right for the stock holders, they should acknowledge that they've got an incredibly lucrative income stream from a gradually dying product line. They should milk the Windows/Office franchise for everything they can, while cutting down development which only at this point enrages customers who have to spend big bucks on migration costs.

Cut everything way back, and send every penny you make straight back to the stock holders (i.e. an Income Trust).

MS Stock would instantly become the hottest income stock on the market. "Hey, we're *not* going to blow every penny we've made for the last 30 years in a futile attempt to stave off the end of our industry. We're just going to make you very, very wealthy!"

MS is sitting on the world's most profitable oil field. There's no shame in acknowledging that it won't last forever - just exploit it as profitably (i.e. cheaply) as possible and give the money to the stock holders.

I really think the GOP has a strong future if it can become the "pro-capitalism, anti-big-corp" party.

And who is going to donate the billions dollars necessary for a successful campaign for a party dedicated to letting you fail if you don't measure up?

Sure, there are the odd individuals who are willing to simply take their chances. But once one has "made it", the next thing is to protect your gains. In other words, why on earth would moneyed individuals or successful companies donate money to promote a system that makes them *less* secure?

Such idiologies only had a chance before it took so much money to win an election. Now, you *must* court the wealthy to have a chance. Your only choice is which moneyed demographic you choose to promote.

Did your comment help or just confuse?

I don't know.

The salesman did start giving a more substantial explanation of the two operating systems (although I really dislike the fact that it's easy to pirate apps on Android used as a selling point), and once he pointed out the network effects ("if your friends all have iPhones", etc.), then I figured that was all the information she needed to make an informed decision and left.

I've listened in as a salesman told a woman that the Samsung was essentially an iPhone" to a woman who came in asking about it. He wasn't pleased when I chimed in that the two weren't quite the same. (I can guess which pays the bigger commission...)

I'm certain he could argue that the woman was using "iPhone" to mean "Smartphone" and he was pointing out that the two Smartphone OSes both have roughly the same feature set. But I'd bet that Tim Cook would feel that but for my intervention, she would have bought an Android "by mistake".