Why publishing houses are needed?
I read the article in the last New Yorker magazine how Amazon has set the price $9.99 per e-book and Apple president with his new iPad and publishing houses are trying to break this price and make it more like $14.95.
They are saying that author makes no more than $2 on the e-book, and no more than $3.90 on the paper book. Everything else goes to the publishing house, the store and other intermediaries between the author and reader.
Which begs the questions:
Why publishing houses are needed at all?
With e-books any author can edit, spell check and finish up his book. Why don’t they sell directly through Amazon/other sites?
Why do we need all those publishing houses: Simon&Shuster, McMillan’s, Pinguin? What exactly do they do to help me read books today?
Primarily quality-control.
Publishing houses act as reader’s first lines of defence against poor writers. If an author’s ideas are original, but they write badly, their prose can be tidied by the editor/publisher. If they are unoriginal AND poor writers, their MSs can be tossed before too many people have wasted too much of their time and money.
Just because someone has run a spell-check doesn’t mean they know how to write, or that they have anything worth saying which hasn’t been said a million times already.
And would you want to pay to read something totally sight unseen?
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