Bernd Samson

Comment Threads

• David L commented on The Faces of Publishing
  ... and by now we ought to have been smart enough to see it coming and head it off. ... ... It's easy to fall into this trap, but every innovation, every new means of connecting creators and consumers has the capability to break down one of these rent-seeking, gatekeeping entities - rather than create a new one. ... It happens over and over because most people don't want to deal with the boring bits of taking creative stuff and getting it in front of the masses and getting money from it so they can live. Reading this I keep...
• J Thomas commented on The Faces of Publishing
  <" ... it is incorrect that no writers succeed on Amazon unless they're already succeeding without it." My claim is based on inferences which might be wrong. I tend to believe without sufficient evidence that the limiting factor for writing success is that customers must want to buy your books enough to find them. Possibly if your book is displayed prominently with a great cover, customers might impulse-buy -- they just grab it without thinking and buy without thinking. But usually they won't do it unless they want to. And I tend to believe that A* does very little to...
• Antonia T Tiger commented on The Faces of Publishing
  It goes all the way back to the pin factory (and beyond). Maybe typing your book into a computer changes the balance between the different tasks, but printing was a skilled manual craft for centuries. And I have heard a few people within publishing companies say rude things about the people who work only with the money. I have thought some of them have been a bit short-sighted, doing all the human things in response to apparent criticism. I've wondered if they had noticed what was happening, or just chose not to look beyond the market-territory their company works it....
• smichel commented on The Faces of Publishing
  "In the 18th century, not surprisingly, wealthy noble patrons favored work that supported the aristocratic ideal, claiming that this was art as opposed to popular trash. If patrons didn't actually contribute cash to needy authors, they could influence the marketplace by using their rank, wealth, and position in promotion." You hit the nail on the head..this is still going on, even from 'small' web press: its called tropes...
• Adrian Midgley commented on The Faces of Publishing
  Specifically, the move from hierarchical classification in a single axis toward tagging, which seems amazingly simple but allows books or other objects to be in many categories, has I suspect affected that if not effected it. Positioning an object along various dimensions or on a plane in an n-dimensional space allows people to pick out clusters which if the books had been arranged on a single dimension would not appear or be easy to locate. Part of this goes with the change from navigation in The Web to search as the primary means of finding things. Navigation requires (to a...