That's the thrust of an article in Forbes.  Picking up on a Wall Street Journal Books blog post by self-published author Nicholas Carr, the article raises some interesting questions: But as with other forays into the digital realm, electronic publishing’s benefits come with some drawbacks. Printed books traditionally serve as reliable historical records, but if authors and publishers maintain the power to alter e-books periodically to make them more commercially attractive to consumers, the texts’ validity such texts could be compromised. For example, a book that doesn’t do as well as expected by its publisher may be changed according to consumer feedback....

Here is the third ten minutes of the thirty-minute discussion I had with Michael Stackpole at GenCon a few months ago. I’m a little embarrassed that it took this long for me to sit down and type it all up. The first part can be found here, and the second here. Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conan movie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel...

Publishing Perspectives has another founder-penned piece promoting a publishing business. This one, called PUBSLUSH Press, aims to crowdsource the gatekeeping process by allowing its users to choose the stories they feel are worthy of publication. The founder, Jesse Potash, was inspired by the story of how much the first Harry Potter novel was rejected (twelve times!) before it found a publisher willing to take a chance on it. Indeed, the publishing world is rife with stories of novels that overcame repeated rejections to become major hits. This suggests that there are still a lot of excellent works out there...

I have been following the story regarding Amazon’s foray into publishing. It reminded me of an old (early 1960s) hit by Gerry and the Pacemakers called How Do You Do It? So let’s set the question with Gerry and the Pacemakers. As the song asks and says, “If I only knew, I’d do it to you.” And that is the crux of the matter in the latest nose thumbing by Amazon. If publishers cannot figure out what is happening, cannot see the upheaval that is coming, then perhaps they should fold their tents and slither away in the night. The truth is that...

Here's an ebook that didn't go through the editorial process.  HarperCollins should be ashamed of themselves.  I just bought Pratchett's Snuff from Amazon and here is some of the stuff I was presented with: imes, for Vimes otherpeople nervouspeople amongpeople see?people servingpeople thepeople watchpeople ofpeople turnip.people puzzledpeople Well,people pub.People with.It andpeople whichpeople too.People somepeople country.People Willikins.People fightpeople thatpeople on.people putpeople much.people whenpeople Thepeople occasionallypeople upsetspeople allpeople long-termcouples annoyingpeople it.People helpingpeople Andpeople Now,people That's just in the first 20% of the book.  Some of them recur over and over. Thanks, HarperCollins for showing us just what you think of your readers!...

Here is the second ten minutes of the thirty-minute discussion I had with Michael Stackpole at GenCon last month. I will be posting the final part in days to come. The first part can be found here. Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conanmovie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel seminar. In this segment, we discuss piracy, e-book pricing, editing, and the “Storyteller’s Bowl”...

At one time in my career as an editor my function was crystal clear: everyone understood and agreed on the role a copyeditor played in the publishing business. But as the years have passed and the traditional publishing industry has consolidated into six megacorporations whose decisions are made based on bean counting, what was once clearcut has become fogged. (For an overview of the various editorial roles, see Editor, Editor, Everywhere an Editor.) This was brought to mind the other day when I was contacted by a client to copyedit a new medical book. The client's inquiry included these points: has recommended...

The short (somewhat obvious) answer, aside from errors introduced by OCR: because publishers cut corners by laying off proofreaders and copy editors, then rush the manuscripts out too quickly for their skeleton crews to catch gaffes. At least that's what one editor confessed to Virginia Heffernan at the New York Times. Another editor, however, says in the era of word processors authors have gotten lazier and stupider: "It is amazing how little review seems to have occurred before the text is sent to the editor. Seriously, you have no idea how sloppy some of these things are." Still, if you've...

Jason Boog of GalleyCat has taken a look at an essay by agent Andrew Wylie coming out in the new issue of WSJ Magazine. Wylie, Boog reports, is concerned about the quality issue in publishing, noting that even with all the self-publishing options available, editors and other quality controllers are an essential part of the process. Here’s an excerpt: “The devaluation of quality editing and writing is sad and it’s inevitable. Each house has a large number of titles to publish, and with a difficult economy, fewer people to handle the publications. But publishers need to...

I’ve talked about scan-induced typo problems in e-books before. For whatever reason, a lot of publishers don’t seem to have the manpower to devote to making sure their scanned e-books properly mirror the quality of their printed books. But they could take a lesson from on-line retailer Zappos, who determined that having higher-quality reviews of products on their site led to more sales of those products. So Zappos used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system of distributed low-cost labor to examine and edit five million reviews on their site, having the Turk workers correct spelling and grammar errors they found while...

Award-winning author Laura Ruby talks about the reissue of her out-of-print book, Lilly's Ghosts, as an ebook.  This required some editing and made her nervous.  From the posting at E is for Book: So, it was nerve-wracking to open the Word file of my OP middle-grade novel LILY’S GHOSTS in preparation for re-release as an ebook. I was tempted to put back my original ending and restore this or that scene. But, as I cleaned up the file, making various small edits here and there, I was happy to find that I didn’t want to revise, oh, everything. And I liked...

On her blog “Out of Ambit”, Diane Duane has written a post partly in response to my e-book quality rant of the other day, talking about her own experiences preparing new editions of some of her e-books. Duane had been using Smashwords to distribute her Middle Kingdoms series, and had no complaints. However, she found that if she wanted to do something about the territorial restrictions preventing most of the world from buying her Young Wizards books without violating her contract terms with the publishers (who own the US and Canada e-book rights), she was going to have...