> is to provide you and me with more to read at a better price than ever before
As a reader, do you want to optimise for price or for quality? The argument is that one will ultimately come at the expense of the other, because good books need good editors and good authors need sufficient money to allow them the time to write.
As a consumer, I care about price, quality and convenience. But I'm agnostic as to how the editorial and advance are delivered.
It's not wholly unreasonable, for example, for some form of crowd funding model to turn up; you publish an outline to a site and folks bid on it.
Similarly, an editor matching service doesn't seem that far fetched.
Or to put it another way, we have perfectly serviceable replacement models for most of what a mass market publisher now does. That's not to say that publishers can't add value but, as with distribution and delivery, it's not too hard to foresee this turning into a niche product.
> you publish an outline to a site and folks bid on it
I'd be very skeptical about that...
> an editor matching service doesn't seem that far fetched
This seems a lot more reasonable. I agree with your overall point that publishers are unlikely to be the best way of doing things, and there's no need to preserve the status quo for its own sake. I'm just not sure Amazon is going about it the right way, and I think reducing the perceived value of books is a dangerous game. That all said, I don't want to be too down on Amazon. They've made reading more convenient for many through the Kindle and the Kindle Store, and that alone is worth a hell of a lot...
The gaming industry is in the middle of doing exactly this. What exactly are you skeptical about? Whether an attempt will be made, or whether an attempt will succeed?
> Whether an attempt will be made, or whether an attempt will succeed?
Neither. More about if it will compromise the artistry if plot is decided by a committee, which is effectively what will happen if the public gets to 'vote' for what they want to be made. Plot-by-comittee works for a lot of television and film so maybe it'll work for books too, but my gut reaction is that you'll get a much better product if the creator can act alone and not have to worry about getting defunded if they kill off a favourite character or some such thing...
None of these points are true in the gaming world so far. Projects are funded based on their ideas, but that does not necessarily entitle the public to a design by committee. Sure, people feel entitled to a voice, but ultimately it's the creators of the game that have the final say. I'm thinking major successes like Minecraft and Star Citizen. Minecraft was pretty much entirely driven by Notch, and Star Citizen is firmly in the hands of CIG.
Now, if they create something that people don't like, sure they will have a tough time getting funded again. But this is a point that is relevant to both the publisher and crowd sourcing model.
I think, if you stop to look past the extremely popular books and look at what people read in between great works of literature, the sorts of things they read err on the side of quantity, not quality. And I'll even go so far as to grant you a conceit that "popular = good", so you can take the entire Stephenie Meyer collection out of the equation as a mere drop in the bucket.
There is a huge market out there. Publishers don't prevent bad books from getting to it.
And they don't really pay authors to write books. More often, all different types of authors, good or bad, have to shoulder the risk of their first few manuscripts on themselves and hope a publisher picks them up. If their first published book does well, then the publisher pays to have more books written. It's a system that is useless to the most popular, breakout authors--they have essentially bootstrapped a book-writing company--and disadvantageous to the anyone who doesn't write a superawesomebestseller on their first try--as the publishers often design the contracts to leave no residuals for the writer.
Books can be--and often are--just as empty and vapid as reality TV. We just tend to put books and the people involved in their production a pedestal in our culture.
As a reader, I think Amazon helps me a lot on the quality information about books I might want to read, as it posts reader reviews and includes those beguiling "Readers who bought this also bought" links frequently to guide me to books I haven't heard about before. On the whole, as a reader who has been reading for half a century, I like the ecosystem for readers better since Amazon came along than I liked it before Amazon came along.
But even if a publishing company selects an author they think is promising, and gives the author sufficient money and time and good editors, it still doesn't necessarily produce the kind of literature that I want to read.
As a reader, do you want to optimise for price or for quality? The argument is that one will ultimately come at the expense of the other, because good books need good editors and good authors need sufficient money to allow them the time to write.