Re:How the shift to ebooks will affect genre categories in f...
by stcredzero on Saturday May 05, 2012 @04:08PM
(#3933127)
You're correct, but book publishers aren't used to thinking in those terms. Traditionally, the job results in a static lump of ink on paper. Game over: you sell it, you're done.
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they also need to do internal process-related things -- like set up a CMS, in-source their typesetting, and modify their workflow to allow updates to existing-and-out-there books, rather than viewing the books as a terminal state at the end of a production process.
I think there's a 3-way non zero-sum opportunity (win-win-win) lurking here if one can get away from the idea that the unit of production is a book as a lump of dead-tree or even as a particular string of bits or even as a stream of versions of a particular string of bits. Instead of focusing on curating individual books, wouldn't everyone win by developing CMS for curating collections of things, like author bibliographies?
In a way, this is what disparate parts of the industry already do. (Like this book by C. Stross? Why not try this other book by C. Stross? Like this book that's supposed to be "Hard Sci-Fi?" Why not read this other book...?) They're already trying to get customers to think of their brand as a good source of [some classification]. They're also motivated to get customers to think of an author as a brand as a good source of [some classification]. This is also how publishers and editors approach the brand represented by anthology series. Really, publishing at its core is the curation of a bibliographies. Customers and authors would benefit from such directed curation. (On the other hand, this might also perpetuate restrictive terms between authors and publishers.)
...
they also need to do internal process-related things -- like set up a CMS, in-source their typesetting, and modify their workflow to allow updates to existing-and-out-there books, rather than viewing the books as a terminal state at the end of a production process.
I think there's a 3-way non zero-sum opportunity (win-win-win) lurking here if one can get away from the idea that the unit of production is a book as a lump of dead-tree or even as a particular string of bits or even as a stream of versions of a particular string of bits. Instead of focusing on curating individual books, wouldn't everyone win by developing CMS for curating collections of things, like author bibliographies?
In a way, this is what disparate parts of the industry already do. (Like this book by C. Stross? Why not try this other book by C. Stross? Like this book that's supposed to be "Hard Sci-Fi?" Why not read this other book...?) They're already trying to get customers to think of their brand as a good source of [some classification]. They're also motivated to get customers to think of an author as a brand as a good source of [some classification]. This is also how publishers and editors approach the brand represented by anthology series. Really, publishing at its core is the curation of a bibliographies. Customers and authors would benefit from such directed curation. (On the other hand, this might also perpetuate restrictive terms between authors and publishers.)