Hacker News Reader

Comment by scdoshi | Hacker News Reader

I went to read thinking maybe there will be some great insight behind his reasoning.

But all it came down to was, bookstores will never sell amazon books, so no major authors will ever go there, so they are fucked.

It's almost annoyingly short-sighted.

View on HN

While I agree with you that not being in bookstores is no dealbreaker any more, I'd like to add that the way things are going is not really satisfying. What if the book/media market, in its natural state, converges towards one big dominating online shop?

Call it the Amazon-takes-it-all system. That can't be good.

But it seems like it can't be avoided either, doesn't it?

The problem is that the quality of books published on Amazon is definitely lower than books published by other publishers. Amazon is making publishing cheaper, meaning there is no longer any quality filter before books are made.

So Amazon is creating a lemon market [1], and generally destroying book publishing to make a buck. People THINK Amazon published books are "as good" as publishers books, and therefore lower the income for the good books.

The end result will be crap books only.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

A friend of mine, who is working in the publishing industry, always tells me how publishing is about the book (as a physical product). When she does that I always reply that it's about the story, not the way you deliver it. Why is it bad to be digital first, physical later?

You're right.

Western Union telegraph offices will never sell telephone service, either, and that hipster vinyl store is never going to sell MP3s.

This matters why, exactly?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com