How many of us are willing to simply toss our money at any manuscript that appears out of the air? Rather, we look for reviews by others who have already risked their $5; occasionally we will be the first to risk our own $5. But are you willing to risk $20,000 on a manuscript that is not one we wrote, which is probably the minimum risk incurred by publishers on even the worst book.

We all want some sort of vetting. What some are unwilling to recognize or accept is that there are levels of vetting and a sophistication to the process that is gained through years of experience, experience that publishing houses often have.

Now, it’s really expensive to publish an ebook. Does that make you happy?

This is why some best-selling authors produce poor copy…they know customers will buy it no matter what and publishers often have no choice but to produce it or lose the author.

I hate to say it, Rob, but this is hardly a good selling-point for the traditional publishing system. Self-perpetuating bad writing in order to make buck is what many people claim is exactly wrong with the present system, and needs to be fixed.

Easily falsifiable signals such as the weight of a bound paper book provide relatively little information. I will say, though, that one reason people buy best-sellers is that the fact that other people are buying them provides a signal of sorts. This is why some best-selling authors produce poor copy…they know customers will buy it no matter what and publishers often have no choice but to produce it or lose the author.

The important point that we’re asking readers to invest their hours as well as their dollars in our books is something that can’t be forgotten and I think Martin is on-point to remind us of that.

Rob Preece
Publisher

One way to judge end-user approval of an ebook is to search for it on bittorrent file-sharing networks. Has anyone taken the trouble to copy it?

After that, you’ve lost me.

i’m counting on excellence in typography and book design to be valued and live forever, even if print goes the way of.. the non-mutant frog? or even the dodo. which seems less likely.

i’m also counting on the quality of e-book design to be inversely proportional to the quality of printed book design, until the two forms reach equilibrium — in which case the printed book will just be a print-on-demand copy of the electronic file. (and in which case i will prefer the electronic version — print-on-demand being an almost perfect analogue to a kinko’s packet in terms of its ‘specialness’.) they’ll eventually be essentially one & the same, i’d predict — going either to my device of choice, or to the on-demand printing/binding machine.

“From the year 1450 until today, people have associated wisdom with printed books that have bindings. A book with a binding implied the following: (1) an editor, (2) a costly printing press, (3) a distribution system, (4) a publisher’s risk. A book required a lot of front-end costs. The reader assumed that a book had value because a publisher concluded, ‘this will make me money.’”

Basically, people attach more value to a book when it went through this heavy process.
If that is true and remains the case, then it should be easy to solve. For example, one signal is offering a money back guarantee.
The price itself is also a signal. A high price can be interpreted as a sign of quality.

Martin makes the plain assumption that an e-book, freed of the shackles of traditional publishing, is easier to get into the hands of consumers… but that they are more likely to be trash. Spoken like a true traditional publisher. As the market changes, the roles of creators, consumers, and middlemen (the publishers) will change as well. And traditional publisher who expects their role in the digital world will be the same as it was in the print world, is fooling themselves.

Another thing: A peacock’s tail is actually the most dishonest thing in zoology. What it actually says is: “Notice me, over any other bird stronger, smarter or faster than me, so I can get laid.”

A market is a means of conveying information from producer to consumer and back again

Maybe for books that you can flick through, but not for movies.

Is the only logical solution is to accelerate the trend towards blockbusters with massive publicity spends – peacock-tails larger and brighter than ever before – or is there some other way of conveying to the consumer the simple message: Many of us have given time to looking at this thing and we guarantee that it will be worth your while to give time to it too?

Replace the “Many of us -publishers” by the “Many of us -reviewer cloud you trust” and you have a different and better organisation to highlight worthy books.

Massive databases hosted by LibraryThing or GoodReads allow this and if we push the concept a little further, build your list of users with trusted tastes who tend to scan the bottom of the ocean for hidden treasures, a good way to get insightful suggestions by totally independent reviewers, and in case of a self-published ebook wave, to split the time formerly spent by the publishers so this can be done voluntarily.

The time spent by the businessman is spent by a review cloud you trust, no downside, more respect to the writer.

Anyway what you’re asking is to somehow incorporate a specific reviewer wage into the ebook price, rather than leave the choice to the consumer, be it a subscription to a reviewing website you trust or your volunteer reviewer cloud.

The fact that it’s an “e-book” doesn’t tell you anything about its quality until you’ve spent the time necessary to download and look at it—unless, as Rich notes, it has the name of some major publisher on it.

On the other hand, printed books at least have had some money and attention put into printing them. (Though this is less true now that any schmuck can get just about anything printed on demand if he’s willing to front the money—including bad Star Wars fanfic.)

But as the market changes, the gatekeepers will change too. For example, Alexandria Digital Literature hosts a collaborative-filtering-based book and story recommendation engine. You tell it what you like and dislike, and it picks out new titles that it thinks you’ll love. (You can also look up books you haven’t read yet for a guess at how well it thinks you’ll like them.) It’s completely genre, content, and publisher-agnostic; all it knows about any title is how well the people who most closely share your tastes liked it.

(After a long down period, Alexlit is up and running again now, so you can even try it out if you like. But be advised it’s running on a crippled trial version of the back-end database software, so will be limited to five simultaneous users at a time for a few months until Dave Howell can get it rewritten to run on a different back end.)