One of the major changes that has come with the rising popularity of ebooks has been self-publishing.  Many authors are bypassing the traditional route of using agents, editors, and publishing houses in favor of self-publishing.  One recently famous example of this new trend is with the controversial Fifty Shades trilogy.  The wikipedia article on self-publishing outlines the advantages and disadvantages of self-publishing.  This article focuses on some of the positive aspects of self-publishing, such as price and diversity, based on its recent success and popularity.

What do you think of self-publishing?  It is helping or hurting the publishing industry, the quality of literature today?  If you were a writer, would you self-publish?

After I read the blog prompt I coincidently stumbled upon a blog post about a possible future of ebooks. On his blog, Seth Godin wrote today about Amazons next kindle to be released to the public: the Kindle Zero. Why is it called zero? It will be free to amazon prime members. If only it were true… it is however a pretty plausible April fools joke. Many people retweeted Godin in full belief that kindle zero was a real thing.

The second interesting news in the blog was the potential cash reward given by Random House and Wiley to read books. (Not an april fools joke) This would be applied to 10% of their books that were previously free. Read a book and earn money. The ebook would use some program to tell if the reader read the book and didn’t just flip through it or scroll to the end. The chart below demonstrates how publishers would actually profit from this:  explained by this site

The one part of the clip from the sweet spot that really struck me was when they were talking about how the music world has changed drastically over the years. The one man mentioned how he once did a story on The Drive By Truckers and they said, “thank god people can’t download t-shirts.” This was really eye opening to me, as I’ve never fathomed something like that. In our society people just don’t do that. But when you think about it, it’s the same concept as pirating music from the internet. In both cases, your are stealing something illegally. For some reason in our society however, stealing music has become a norm that people don’t think twice about. And if anything people who actually pay for the  songs they have are in the minority. It’s a sad thought to ponder that we are a generation of people that have grown so accustomed to a specific type of theft. The music world has suffered from this and the book world has suffered and will continue to suffer from this with the influx of E-books. Should clothing companies be worried that they are next- that one day someone may find a way to actually download clothing?