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Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

I've spent hours trawling Amazon for cheap e-books, and I've come to the conclusion that self-publishing is not a model that produces high-quality books.

Editors provide significant value to me as a reader. Whatever strategy Amazon is using, I certainly hope it includes a competent editing arm.

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It's not that different than an app store, youtube, itunes, etc. where there's virtually no barrier to entry. Most of it will suck, but so far we've done a decent job of separating the wheat from the chaff. The only thing that would worry me about books is how much longer it takes to review them compared to the other forms of media I mentioned. That will result in smaller sample sizes on reviews and a less accurate picture.

I wonder if it's simply that it will require volume and curation like a lot of other free/cheap content?

Book reviews are coming back, eh!

Agreed: I suspect that in the future virtually all writers will also write blogs (or the successor of blogs), along with miscellaneous other material designed to show that "Hey! I can at least write coherent sentences based on reasonable ideas."

I guarantee it produces higher quality books. You simply mean the market is saturated with mediocre books. When you open the floodgates, you get more of everything. It might be harder to find the quality books, but I guarantee there are more of them.

Really you have come to the conclusion that self-publishing does not produce cheap high-quality books.

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