On The Millions, would-be published author Edan Lepucki writes about her experiences dealing with the rejection of her manuscript by multiple publishers. It’s a wryly humorous piece about the thought process behind accepting that publishers don’t want a book, putting it in a drawer, and moving on. One of the points Lepucki touches on is a lack of desire to try to self-publish. She cites the necessity of doing a lot of extra work that would otherwise have been done by the publisher, the difficulty of making money in self-publishing, and the stigma attached to it. She writes, “The...

In the wake of the Amazon/Macmillan e-book pricing affair and the reader comments it stirred up, Charlie Stross has decided to tackle some common misconceptions about the publishing industry on his blog. He has made two posts so far. The first misconception Stross covers is simply that “the publishing industry makes sense.” He notes that a lot of discussions about “the publishing industry” treat it as a more or less uniform entity where every part works about the same as every other part. He goes on to explain that this is not quite true. For the rest...

There's a lot of talk about whether e-books will be able to mimic the physical qualities of p-books, but often this talk focuses on the "feel" of books. People like to rifle through pages, smell the paper, make notes in the margins, et cetera. A p-book does not just act as a container of a book, but also as a preservation device. And it does this against heavy odds. Modern, "acid" paper deteriorates quickly, but it is still possible to preserve books printed on such paper for a long time---hundreds of years in some cases. In theory, e-books can last much longer...