=) =) =)

Sometimes I wonder if, during the advent of television, novelists and publishers were in a frenzy thinking, ‘We need to figure how to get novels on these things!’ And in the end, it’s a different medium. I very much hope and expect that we’ll see a different medium of storytelling on some future multi-media platform, but I’m not sure it’ll any way supplant a single novel, any more than TV shows do.

Now I’m off to see what Pandamian is! This site is v. impression, so I’m sure I won’t be disappointed!

As for whether authors selling directly to readers makes sense … well, we’ll see, won’t we? ;-)

I’m late to the conversation, and need to inform myself more thoroughly (and the dog I have in this fight is that I make a living as a novelist), but I sometimes get the feeling that people imagine that all the steps of publication other than the writer finishing her or his ‘final’ draft are unimportant.

The publishing industry is tremendously inefficient. But I’ve yet to see even the vague outline of a real solution. (Haven’t finished browsing your site yet, though!) One thing that the industry does fairly well is act as a filter, and every online community I’ve seen that tries to approximate that service ends up highlighting some deeply shitty writing. I mean far, far worse than the deeply shitting writing that -does- get published. And without the compensatory ability to promote the good stuff, too.

As for Baen, I thought I’d referred to them here before, but I’m happy to refresh your memory. Maybe one of us should mail them about the programming issue :p. Though I imagine their users might be fond of the design, because it is soo wrong in a nerdy way.

I do wonder however, why it seems that it’s often the genre publishers who aren’t afraid to embrace new things.

In one of my recent classes we had someone from a big dutch publisher, who told us that on Bol.com (the Dutch amazon equivalent), people sought on genre most.
10 minutes later the person explained to us that his company had unexpectedly acquired a strong brand in the thriller genre, so they branched out and attracted literary fiction authors.
And then they wonder why the book business is going through rough times. The sheer stupidity of publishers sometimes baffles me.

Online, production costs go way way way down. So the problem to solve is bringing an audience to web fiction.

@Steve: Yes we do. I intend to build equivalents.

@Derek: Thank you for the kind words. =) I don’t personally think a move to ebook readers is enough to force the publishing industry to change – thus far publishers have managed to fool themselves into thinking ebooks are an extension of the old problem – the problem they’ve been set up to solve.

@Jan: Thank you so much for the heads up. MeiLin was the last person to point Baen out to me – but I had no idea they were this progressive, (and so many years ago, to boot!).

I think the problem with their execution is the lack of technical knowledge? They should’ve hired a bunch of programmers to do stuff for them – Baen’s well positioned to be the next Tor.com, if they play their cards right.

Will keep them in mind when and if we need to cut deals, in the future.

It’s not one of the big publishers I realize, but it is fairly big in the SF market (somewhere in the top 10 in the US according to Wikipedia)

It obviously works great for them, so I wonder why no one else (except maybe for Harlequin, which has had a very active, prominent and cheap digital branch for years now) has jumped on this system.

So do we need a youbook or a blogger for books?

I guess these old industries are just really following the old mantra of “if it’s not broke don’t fix it”. If can get a high enough move to eBook readers old industry will be forced to move, but until then it’s the status quo

Since you mentioned Shirky above, I presume you read this blog post: The Collapse of Complex Business Models
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models/

Explains a lot, I think.

So far – I think – they make sense.