Editing will likely remain a paid position, yes. (Though I know people who do it for free for friends.) That doesn't mean it needs to be done by a publisher, nor does it mean that the editors working for publishers are really worth what they get paid. Can an author arrange for their own work to be properly edited? Of course, that's just a new skill needed to be successful. This may be a bad or good thing (marketing seems to be required of most new authors right now, for instance, and that often ends poorly), but it's hardly unthinkable. Lots of musicians are learning how to be recording engineers now for home recording, after all.
I was careful to explicitly not conflate editing with design. But like I said, raw text is fine. I'm dead serious, I've read dozens of books in that format. No layout needed. Or if you want to be fancy, do it up in LaTeX. Some minor markup and boom, you have some of the most perfect and beautiful typesetting ever produced. Fancy text layout is not required.
I think we have plenty of alternative filtering models to choose from, starting with the obvious word of mouth. Browsing a bookstore (that is, using the implicit filer of what managed to get published) is nice, but it's hardly the only way I choose which books to buy. I swim in a world of crap (the internet) and still find amazing pearls pretty much every day thanks to the extensive, decentralized filtering system of friends passing around links. Of all the concerns about how things will work in the new model, this worries me the least. Particularly since it's only really a problem if you're paying for the media, and, well, we've yet to see if that will really be the case.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
I was careful to explicitly not conflate editing with design. But like I said, raw text is fine. I'm dead serious, I've read dozens of books in that format. No layout needed. Or if you want to be fancy, do it up in LaTeX. Some minor markup and boom, you have some of the most perfect and beautiful typesetting ever produced. Fancy text layout is not required.
I think we have plenty of alternative filtering models to choose from, starting with the obvious word of mouth. Browsing a bookstore (that is, using the implicit filer of what managed to get published) is nice, but it's hardly the only way I choose which books to buy. I swim in a world of crap (the internet) and still find amazing pearls pretty much every day thanks to the extensive, decentralized filtering system of friends passing around links. Of all the concerns about how things will work in the new model, this worries me the least. Particularly since it's only really a problem if you're paying for the media, and, well, we've yet to see if that will really be the case.