Morrison v Konrath on the self-publishing bubble

Fine fun and games -- some weeks ago Ewan Morrison published an article in the Guardian which argued that the current mania for putting self-published books onto the Amazon web site for a Kindle readership should be seen as a typical boom-bust scenario.  On other words, there was an expanding bubble of E-published rubbish on Amazon, with no editorial or quality control, and which would eventually burst, having done a great deal of harm to the conventional publishing industry in the process.  I was quite taken, when I read it, with the image of a system overwhelmed by millions and millions of self-published Ebooks, most of them lacking in quality and in dire need of some serious editing, simply clogging up the system and making it impossible for the decent books to emerge at the top of the pile........

There was another article in the Guardian by Alison Flood, reporting on a talk by Jonathan Franzen at Cartagena, in which he bewailed the damage done by Ebooks, the supposed lowering of standards, and the decline of traditional published books and publishing houses in the face of the Kindle revolution.  He seemed to equate the process with the decline of civilization itself.............

Well, Joe Konrath has come out fighting.  The guru of Kindle writers has a post on his blog which slams both Franzen and Morrison, and effectively accuses them of being Luddites and alarmists.  He concludes his piece thus:

1. People fear change. When change happens, they dig in like ticks and try to defend their long-held and closely-cherished beliefs. (BTW, another term for long-held/closely cherished belief is prejudice. And prejudice ain't good.)

2. The same memes about ebooks keep getting circulated again and again and again because folks are too lazy to do any kind of simple research to inform their opinions.

3. Ebooks are going to follow the examples set by the music, movie, and TV industries. The future is digital, and anyone who disagrees with that is seriously out of touch with reality.

So all you ebook self-pubbers out there: ignore the alarmists. There are always doomsayers and Luddites and nostalgia whores who bitch and moan when new technologies take over. But they don't matter. Because new technologies don't care if some folks resist them--they take over anyway.


Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Franzen and the Ebook Bubble  http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00-06:00&updated-max=2012-02-01T00:00:00-06:00&max-results=11

I am more and more convinced by the Konrath arguments -- not simply because the technology is here to stay, but also because the process of writing and selling for the Kindle is both subversive and empowering.  There is an anarchistic streak in all of us, and it is clear that those who do manage to notch up massive sales of Kindle books (admittedly they make up a very small percentage of the total number of authors competing in the market) take great pleasure in kicking the system and blowing raspberries in the direction of all those snotty agents and publishers in their past histories who turned them down flat......

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These are the offending Guardian pieces:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/30/self-e-publishing-bubble-ewan-morrison

The self-epublishing bubble
In August 2011, Ewan Morrison published an article entitled Are Books Dead and Can Authors Survive?. Here, he tracks the self-epublishing euphoria of the last five months and argues that we are at the start of an epublishing bubble
Ewan Morrison
guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 January 2012


http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/30/jonathan-franzen-ebooks-values?newsfeed=true
Jonathan Franzen warns ebooks are corroding values
Freedom author tells festival audience that the 'impermanence' of ebooks is incompatible with enduring principles
Alison Flood
guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 January 2012