Quality Control

Epublishing has made self-publishing a lot easier. That's obvious. But what are the ramifications?

Many people talk about the new ease of self-publishing as an unqualified good thing. They talk of cutting out the middle man and being fair to authors. They don't want publishers telling them what's worth reading.

Even Amazon seems to be behind this view, despite recently becoming a publisher:

"The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader”

On the other side, there are the complaints that this change is an unqualified disaster. Books are dying, publishing's dying, and so on... but isn't the truth somewhere in the middle?

"Quality control" is an interesting phrase, and very accurate. The way to assurequality is to maintain control. But our values are quality and freedom.

This news story got me thinking. Yes, publishing of news is becoming more decentralized through blogs and social media. Yes, people tend to want news for free now. But do we really want to get rid of major news networks? Trade CNN and BBC for a loose collection of whichever blogs have caught our interest?

Book publishing has more in common with this dilemma than we might at first think. Yes, publishers are controlling. But they are also offering quality - or at least they should be.