261–270 of 752 posts
Can't help but feel for the publishing industry considering how shafted they got by tech. You distribute books all over the country? Amazon can do it better and cheaper. You print books? Well we have e-books now. You have a massive back catalog? Google just scanned all of it. You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly. You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarte…
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And if you add in TV shows, there's more great content out there than I'll ever have time to watch.
Video games, too. I live through the 90s yet my backlog includes thousands of hours of reputedly-amazing games from that decade that I didn’t get to at the time.
Haven't libraries already been a "Netflix of books" for millenia now?
Most libraries that people have access to are more like "Disney+ for books". They have a limited selection of extremely mainstream books. If you're happy to make do with whatever they have on offer then you're fine, but if you want something specific you'll have to go out and buy it. Back in the DVD days and before everyone broke ranks and tried to start their own service, the thing that made Netflix great was that n…
Just going to drop this here: https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-... This comes up constantly and it’s just wrong.
I recently started buying paper books. Yes, it's not particularly ecological, but I found that I'm able to focus at the text much better this way. My Kindle (despite plenty of obvious advantages) just doesn't really work for me. It took me years to realize this, but I always start to tinker with the brightness settings, switch pages back and forth, go into the book library and back, play with highlighting words, etc.…
Paper books are also just orders of magnitude easier to flip through and re-read specific chapters, paragraphs or sections. I can skim through a shelf full of books in a way that I’m just not able to with ebooks, even with stuff like full text search available in Calibre.
The article is fascinating but worrying. I do hope the industry survives in some form. I love the experience of reading books. It would be a shame if everything was digital although it seems like an inescapable conclusion after looking at the data in the article…
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You really have to write it for yourself if you want to keep going - unless you're lucky or have a large following already it's hard to get a lot of readers. I've written stories and serials and posted them on social media, my personal site, etc. (I release them as Creative Commons works) and few people read them. Self-published authors who want to make a living typically have to do a lot of promotion to get a chance…
Many successful artists in any medium say they create things for themselves; it's more a compulsion than a business activity. Some are lucky that others like it; some are even luckier that others like it during the creator's lifetime; the luckiest even make money from it!
As an aside though I feel that the science/engineering heavy HN crowd would bring some life to science fiction. We have the ability to write things that make technical sense and I'm sure many of you internally roast the handwaviness seen in some franchises. I don't know if I'm the only one that does this but I plan out the computer networks my characters use, draw cutaways and chip architecture diagrams for new devices I come up with, read scientific papers for research, and so forth. Sometimes that's even more fun than the actual writing!
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This is not good news. I just got my first eInk reader today and first thing I did was go through all the navigation setup pages. I have one professional development book and was going find a work of fiction to start. Hope it works out.
FWIW - This (GP post) is not my experience with eReaders. Not sure if they have the eInk one or not (like the Fire or tablet ones), but I have the eInk sort. Anyway, I really like it because it's far lighter weight than a paperback, easier to hold, and I can have like the entire library on there and take it with me. I don't experience the distraction that they are referring to, because there's really not anything els…
Theres something rather magical about reading books. Or perhaps Im just an old fart that grew up without the internet. The article is fascinating but worrying. I do hope the industry survives in some form. I love the experience of reading books. It would be a shame if everything was digital although it seems like an inescapable conclusion after looking at the data in the article…
But it has such a high requirement of education and practice, and demands such a high price in focus and attention. Its no wonder that it doesnt fit most people’s lives.
Can't help but feel for the publishing industry considering how shafted they got by tech. You distribute books all over the country? Amazon can do it better and cheaper. You print books? Well we have e-books now. You have a massive back catalog? Google just scanned all of it. You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly. You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarte…
IMO there are still quality publishers, but they are small and tend to focus on specific topics. Two that I'm aware of, although I'm sure there are more out there: - https://lostartpress.com - https://tinhouse.com