philgoetz

Comment Threads

• Simon commented on Another deceptively simple question
  My general guess is that do to various social and technologicla trends, you'll see a lot of fragmentation in the market. Paperbacks might survive for a while yet and E-Books will certainly grow more diverse, howevever the actual number of readers of anything we'd recognize as a book is liable to shrink. I'll speak for the US only but our "reader" population is shrinking, many newer immigrants come from cultures where reading is rare (Mexico, see this article, Google The Country That Stopped Reading) or from cultures where recreational reading is rare and frowned on as wasteful (some Asians and...
• Simon commented on Another deceptively simple question
  With apologies for replying to myself. I neglected a couple of things. The issue in play is a faliure of policy in the interaction of the society with cultures that make up parts of it. Its not a race issue or religious one as lack of interest in reading crosses lines of culture and ethnicity Simply , the educational system and "public well being" systems are not that good at encouraging recreational reading in any group . That reading is the real cornerstone of publishing. We've had this issue since the 1980's or before and have limited success with changing...
• philip.cresswell commented on Another deceptively simple question
  I'll hazard a guess that some eBooks will still look like someone took the dead tree version and OCRd it and then ran with the result without further editing or checking. That seems to be the current standard....
• zhochaka commented on Another deceptively simple question
  There are signs the "manly men" market is still there, even if some of them are pretty ugly. For instance, it's a thread in John Ringo's writing, with the dial turned up to 11 for the series which starts with Ghost. But what I remember is the existence of long series of short novels, reminiscent of the pulps. And I can't say I see that. Maybe that is a market for ebooks put out by non-traditional publishers: not self-published, but some sort of branded product turned out by a group of authors?...
• Charlie Stross commented on Another deceptively simple question
  The focus will be on social interactions centered around text. Au contraire; reading [fiction] is an intensely private activity. And corporate requirements are divorced from those of the readers: corporations want profit, readers want fulfillment. (Finally: your advice wrt. web design is unwanted and will be ignored.)...