The problem with self-published books

Second, it’s hard to know which books are good.

I have had those exact problems long before ebooks. I still have a pile of unread legacy books. Some bought a decade before, others borrowed and never returned (my local library closed down), many inherited, older than me.

Not to mention, new books are being written all the time while older titles remain available. You can read a book a week and you'll still be behind... forever.

This is a direct result of the effort required to really read a book, tens or hundreds of hours. It's much easier to buy than to consume.

Professional reviewers and a recognizable author's name are the traditional solutions to those problems. Buying a book from someone whose blog you like (essentially sampling) is IMHO superior to both. Maybe because I don't share reviewers' tastes.

A better solution is of course always welcome but the challenge isn't new.

This isn't a problem with self-published books. I don't have any ebooks at all. I have two full IKEA bookshelves loaded with actual physical books I want to read. But I don't read them as regularly as I'd like to. Why? It's because I don't make time for them, plain and simple. Same reason I don't exercise as much as I'd like to, or go on dates with my wife as much as I'd like to.

You have to set aside time to do reading, or any important task where the payoff isn't immediate (in seconds, like 2048), because otherwise it won't happen because there are so many other things competing for your attention.

I've also been a freelance writer since my teens, having been published in books, magazines, newspapers, and weeklies. And I read like heck. So I know this arena.

There are a few more problems the author does not mention. The number #1 problem on the internet is that everybody wants to be an author, but nobody wants to be an editor. You can click a button and poof! You're published. Back when you had to send it to somebody, and get sometimes biting criticism, you tended to think more carefully about what you wrote. As a self-publisher, you have to be extremely paranoid about quality. And even then, what you don't see, you don't see. It's hard/impossible to replace a good professional editorial staff.

The second problem is that the physicality of books is different from e-books. Don't get me wrong: I love e-books. But for certain things, like learning a new complex skill, I want to have physical books scattered around the office opened to certain passages with other passages dog-eared or bookmarked. E-books just ain't the same.

I also wonder if we're not selling a shitload of e-books that nobody is ever getting around to reading. A lot of people buy books (or e-books) for their imagined experience -- not for the real one. When you have physical books, you can see when your stack is growing large. With e-books, it's very easy to over-consume.

Not sure a book club would help with that, but it would solve the problems the writer mentions. Perhaps some other features could be added to the group?

(I also need to mention that years ago I started a website for startups/hackers to recommend and share books. The idea was something like a social network, but instead of posting or sharing links or status updates, you posted new book titles and shared them. http://hn-books.com)

You have trouble reading ebooks and, I presume, prefer paper? Self-publishing is entirely compatible with offering a paper version of the book.

Books that aren't listed on places like Amazon are troublesome? Good thing it's really easy to get a self-published book on Amazon.

Self-published doesn't have to mean self-everything.

A major part of my business strategy is going to comic book conventions and sitting behind a table, talking to people who stop there, telling them about my book and possibly exchanging one for some money. Sometimes I'll have someone buy my comic and come back the next day to rave about it. It may be relentlessly physical and retro, but it's working. I feature the URL of my site in my physical books, and let people comment on new pages as I draw them; there's a modest amount of back and forth between them now and then.

I dunno what parts of that can be transferred to tech books, I don't think there's a vibrant network of tech book fairs out there! A book club sounds like a pretty good idea, really.

(If you're gonna be at ECCC in Seattle this weekend, stop by table CC-09 and say hi.)

I guess the screen problem can be solved by getting a Kindle with e-ink, but getting the right headspace is harder.

I like the idea of a book-club, but the problem is I have a list of books i want to get through personally and so my list may not be the same as the book club. I wouldn't read a book just because it was on this month's reading list in the book club.

The book has to be of interest to me for me to participate, and there's no knowing if interests would align well or not.

This is much more a problem with individual habit than publishing.

I saw someone use a perfect term for this - infosugar - the equivalent of reaching for a handful of Doritos and a swig of Mountain Dew multiple times a day instead of making a meal of a book.

Personally, I just uninstalled all those apps.

>"Second, it’s hard to know which books are good. Because most self-published books aren’t listed on a marketplace like Amazon (where user reviews abound), it’s difficult to get a good sense of whether I would enjoy a given book."

I'm sure an Amazon listing facilitates collecting reviews, but even then there's an awful lot of material on Amazon with few, if any reviews. At a glance, 25-50% of any given category or search has reviews <= 1.

I think the answer here is simply for self-publishers to make more of each book available to browse online. I'm far more likely to buy a book if I thumb through it (literally or virtually) beforehand.

In my experience, self-publishers are often terrible about this as they provide perhaps a fragment of a chapter and sometimes nothing more than a table of contents alongside a premium price.

Ideally, I think there would be at least a substantial fraction of the book online to browse. Unless you're selling the promise of "secrets" or whatever there's probably nothing to fear, cheapskates aren't going to pay regardless.

>"We need our own book club."

I like book clubs, but I really have to wonder about one which sounds like it would be a pretty damn self-referential. How do you deal with honest reviewing and priority of titles when both the reviewers and authors are part of the same reputation economy?

The GBN was a network of "interesting" people, and they would put forward books. Stewart Brand would take these suggestions, add his own, and write very insightful reviews. You would really hear about new, interesting stuff there first. It was a book club in a broadcast sense, where they suggest things to read, rather than a discussion forum.

Sadly, GBN was acquired and people moved on. For a long time, the list of books and reviews was still online, but now all of gbn.com seems to be down.

Maybe that could inspire more of a HN book club, which wouldn't just be "startup books", but interesting stuff in the HN vein.

Edit: [3] is a list of the books for 1988 to 2006, from archive.org

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

[2] http://sb.longnow.org/SB_homepage/Home.html

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20070316053617/http://www.gbn.co...

This was true for me... 10 years ago. Now I have a kindle and all these ebooks zipped onto a device more suited for reading ebooks. And they're getting read.

> It's hard to tell which books are good.

I find this to be true for All The Books; even if I do find/read favorable reviews, I can still mislike a book even if it's not independently published.

The book sold a few hundred copies, thanks to a few reviews on websites and a post on Slashdot. The challenges then are the same today: self-publishers tend to be poor marketers or to not have the time/resources to market effectively; lack of quality reviews and an abundance of pay-to-play review sites that will take your money and do very little for sales; self-published titles are (often justifiably) seen as less worthy than texts backed by an established publisher; and there's an overall shortage of available attention, thanks to the abundance of media options today.

>Tools like Draft, Scrivener, and Penflip have improved the writing, editing and collaboration process.

Technology may make editing easier but it does not improve it. A decent writer won't need a grammar checking algorithm.

>Publishing software like iBooks Author, Leanpub, Softcover, Pressbooks, and Liberio allow authors to easily design, format, and publish their books themselves.

These tools are helpful but there's a reason professional designers exist.

>And e-commerce platforms like Gumroad, Memberful, and Digital Goods Store have solved the payment and distribution problem.

But these problems pale in comparison to getting marketing and attention.

What's more, these issues are the same for other self-published media: apps, music, and videos.

I'd love to have my book or my app (http://blocfall.com/) discussed by a reviews group, but a review in the New York Times or front-page placement in the iTunes App Store would be a lot more helpful.

In the past I've used an etherpad to "live chat" and collaborate on problems with students (e.g. https://piratenpad.de/p/linearalgebra ), but I think a forum dedicated to the book would be more interesting.

It's a win-win situation: the author benefits from receiving feedback from readers, and readers can connect with like-minded people. Excuse me while I go learn how to install discourse with MathJax support ;)

> use drip emails to track your progress through a book,

Yes. This would be awesome as it might push you to read the book, but it would have to be done intelligently to work. Just a nagging reminder prodding you to read won't do it. Maybe receiving a weekly batch of exercises or review questions?

I don't think that everyone selling their own books on their own sites is a stable equilibrium.

It should be on the App Store soon (awaiting Apple's approval!). If you are interested in trying it, send me an email. bridger@understudyapp.com

There's no reason you can't publish a hard copy and sell it on Amazon (I did that, on a topic relatively off-topic for HN).

Instead of seeing my books and thinking "holy crap I'm so behind it'll take me years to read through just the books I own", I think "This is awesome! Whenever I'm done with my current book I can go on to read whatever I want. I'll never run out of potential knowledge. "

The positive outlook makes reading fun again.

If you turn reading into a chore, you'll see it as one.