The publishing industry is a whole lot more than someone drafting in word…
Anybody can hire an editor.
After 3 days it suddenly struck me how hilarious this is. How does one fact check if substantial amounts are gone or impossible to find?
You get the modern internet, great editing, wonderful font set, the best marketing money can buy under the sun, no references. Sort of factual, we think... uhh... trust us!
[1] - void(0)
But not all books need all of those services. The editing, copy editing, and fact checking can be left to the responsibility of a motivated producer to provide, or to a motivated consumer to demand. (Of course, a producer might decide to skip those, and serve non-discerning consumers who don't worry about factuality. But … well, that's where we are, anyway, and always have been. There was yellow journalism well before social media.) Typesetting can be handled automatically for bulks that never leave the computer, which is probably many of them. I'm quite OK if books aren't marketed to me; I think I've hardly ever intentionally consumed a book based on an ad anyway.
As to funding, the whole point of the claim to which you were responded was that there are plenty of people are willing to write for free, so that there is no need for separate funding. This means that we'll get literature that reflects the skills and interests of the people who are interested enough in writing to do it for free, and who can support themselves while they do so. Well, OK; it's not a representative sample, but neither is the literature we have now, nor has it ever been historically. (Of course, too, some writing is inherently costly: travel writing, for example, is costly even if you are willing to do the writing itself for free. But not all writing needs all of these services.)
I'm curious (but not complaining!) about the downvote—whether it indicates disagreement with my claim that some of these services are not needed for some books, or something else. If the latter, then I'd like to know what, to understand better the nature of the argument. If the former, I would be very interested to hear that case! (That is, the case that all books need all of the services "edit, copy edit, fact check, type set, market and fund writing".)
As an academic, where publishers are particularly parasitic, and where academics do, indeed, provide all of these services for free (and worse, since we still wind up paying, directly or indirectly, the publishers' exorbitant fees), I share the sentiment of my sibling commenter pessimizer (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32975366).
Plenty of people write software for free. Why don't we just use all software however we like? If people who write software for financial gain decide to quit would it be such a loss?
When this happens we will finally have the Year of the Linux Desktop, and it will be a good year.
You could argue I have an innate desire to care for people inasmuch as I was a volunteer ambulance officer for a while. But I’m pretty glad we pay doctors and nurses and paramedics to dedicate their working lives to doing an excellent job of that stuff rather than just assume that pro bono efforts will see us through. I think it’s enormously naive to assume we’d lose nothing if we took away art as a profession - especially since it’s so obvious it would be a dumb idea to do away with many other professions.
Also I find it hard enough finding books and music I genuinely love even WITH the profit motive at work and giving people the ability to dedicate their lives to it!
But only a tiny percentage of the population is any good at writing books. If those people stop doing so or greatly cut back on doing so it is a big loss even if that doesn't change the total number of books written each year by a noticeable amount.
Ed wood made a lot of movies, they were not any better after he had gained a lot of experience. The assumption that there is significant improvement on what you with time only occurs if there is self reflection and feedback loops and an incentive to progress.
I think it's fine to give authors a temporary monopoly of say ten or twenty years, to reward production. The problem is when the modern special-interest-driven capitalist system hooks into this and keeps lobbying to increase the length of copyright, benefitting estates and conglomerates, rather than the initial authors doing the creative work. And the public pays the cost.
I think the point is to pay successful writers so they keep writing.
Pay them and distribute ebooks for free. Where is the contradiction? The money just have to come from other sources than selling the books.
Free ebooks mean more readers. This is something desirable, no?
Few times this has been mentioned by an american in some group of people somewhere I managed to be too, puzzled looks from all others followed (few times also from other americans). That's literally the only time I ever heard anybody mentioning wanting to write a book (well apart from doing children's book made just of illustrations from 1 german lady, but that ain't the same category, and she just went and did it by the time I met her and it was great).
That music making mentioned has much higher popularity, we all have been young and some still are in our hearts.
I don't think I am that much of an outlier, I've spent tons of time with folks from all continents, cultures and religions when backpacking, working, socializing in our tiny cosmopolitan metropole of Geneva. I don't want to state that nobody wants to write, but "huge percentage" is roughly in 1/2% if I am optimistic and take everybody that ever even fleetingly mentioned it by their word.
To me personally it just sounds like too much actual effort and self-torture for some at-best mediocre output. One can learn whole new sports, hobbies, do long adventures that will create tons of memories that will make you smile and have that distant look into past when you will be dying and remembering them... that's worth investing some time into, not 10 millionth average book
