Exactly what I wrote in saying that many writers will not expect money. But those who do—as a result of the review threshold about which the Economist has written—may find the challenges even harder than expected.

Thanks,
David

Ebooks and digital publishing will greatly lower the bar for getting a book out to the world. They already have. This certainly means that a lot of poor quality work is available. But that’s what the internet is – a huge free-for-all, populated mostly by junk, but with a ton of really great stuff, too. There is money to be made in sorting it, promoting the good, and things like that. And the existence of thousands of awful blogs and MySpace pages doesn’t mean that the good content is lost, or that one can’t make a living by producing quality content.

The Long Tail is not about everyone who fancies him or herself an author (or a blogger or a whatever) being able to make a living that way. But it is about anyone being able to put something out there and see if people like it. If they do, great. And maybe it’s only a niche of a dozen people who like it. When you don’t worry about shelf space and printing costs, that’s okay.

You write: “If a book sells two copies, it doesn’t matter so much – you haven’t sunk so much money into printing books that will need to be unloaded somehow. Crowdsource some of your promotional duties, make it easy to find new authors, and you can be very successful.”

But what about the writers? Many will not care about money, aiming books only at family and friends, but others will be rather disappointed, because they were hoping for professional promotion. Furthermore, if the book is truly published, rather than just distributed, you need to factor in such expenses as copy editing. The costs will be the same for E, at least if publishers and writers care, as it is for P.

Bottom line: I don’t think that this model will work for either writers or publishers if quality and commercial success are concerns. And authors will suffer especially, with promo duties shifted to them even more than now. You can bet that professional publicists will not take too much interest in such low-volume books.

Thanks,
David

I agree that ebooks fit the Long Tail better than print books, but just because it’s easy to make money with a low sales volume because of your nearly infinite “warehouse” doesn’t mean that the people who are now promoting paper books can’t soon promote ebooks. Yes, there will be more ebooks published, and the book-to-professional-advocate ratio will change for the worse.

But that only opens up an opportunity for new business. All those who professionally promote paper books can continue to do so, but now there can be so many more books to promote. And while production costs drop, so does the risk to the publisher/promoter. If a book sells two copies, it doesn’t matter so much – you haven’t sunk so much money into printing books that will need to be unloaded somehow. Crowdsource some of your promotional duties, make it easy to find new authors, and you can be very successful.

I think your focus is too much on what is being destroyed without looking enough at what is now possible. You’re absolutely right that there are challenges to moving towards digital distribution (See: The music industry), but I think in the end, the book industry will grow overall.

You also write: “And just because ebooks don’t need the traditional channels of production and publishing in the same way that print books do doesn’t mean they don’t need (Or won’t get) a professional advocate to make sure people know about the book.”

But keep in mind that e-books are more of a Long Tail medium than paper books because they require fewer resources to produce. The book-to-professional-advocate ratio will probably change for the worse. Or else, because of the lower expenses of e-publishing, there will be more books period.

Meanwhile let me say I’m a booster of the long tail and am not in favor of limits on the number of e-books—as if they could be imposed anyway! It’s just that there are some rather formidable publicity challenges, and the continued existence of big media could actually help through the megaphone effect.

Thanks for your thoughts even if we disagree here!

David

And just because ebooks don’t need the traditional channels of production and publishing in the same way that print books do doesn’t mean they don’t need (Or won’t get) a professional advocate to make sure people know about the book.

I think you’re taking a couple of different arguments and cramming them together here without explaining how they fit or why they’re relevant. Don’t assume that, just because ebooks don’t need a printer, they won’t get any of the other things that go into distributing a paper book.