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Where's the Filter?

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Submitted by darenwang on Tue, 03/30/2010 - 02:02
So Apple has put a partnership in place through Smashwords to let you publish your book to the iBookstore with no up front cost, and only a 15% commission on sales. It's pretty much frictionless as well--just load up a Word doc, and you're set. No layout issues, etc.
What's that mean. If you are Melville and you have to self-pub, you can get it done with no hassle. But as a consumer of books, that means that every yahoo with a word processor can be a published author in 10 minutes. The barrier is so low, we can now expect a whole new genre--the drunk pub. Some crap you wrote in 10th grade reads great to you after a St. Patty's day bender, and you go home and load it up. It's just like drunk dialing, except much more embarrassing.
Most of the publishing industry is about the filter. Editors, Agents, Booksellers, Publicists, Reviewers, and book festival directors are all about finding ways to connect you with the next book you want to read. The physical creation and distribution is really incidental.

If you want to be part of the next thing in publishing, figure out how to be the filter. Folks in the publishing world keep looking at the disaster that is the music business, and they try to learn their lessons from them. Here's an idea: Create Pandora for books. A real live mechanism that tells you that if you like a, b, c, and d, you should take a look at f and g. If you can make that work, then you really are disrupting the vast mechanism of the book trade.


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