If you love books, interesting thoughts on the state of book publishing today. Some good points about publishers, quality and sorting through the firehose.
I still think Devon could benefit from an editor of his tweets.
Devon Eriksen
@Devon_Eriksen_
Ah, yes, the curation problem. To understand it, we have to have a long talk about Amazon.
Amazon isn't killing the book industry. That oft-repeated allegation is completely and totally false.
But it IS failing to save it.
The practice at Amazon-the-large-conglomerate is have an empty chair present at every meeting, to serve as a reminder of who
@JeffBezos
calls "the most important person in the room".
The customer.
But tiny fragment of Amazon that is Amazon-the-bookseller has repeatedly failed to learn his intended lesson.
You see, Amazon-the-bookseller thinks selling books is a solved problem. This is because Amazon sees the bookselling business from the perspective of Amazon-who-sells-books, not the perspective of people who like to read.
An Amazon insider once told me, in all sincerity:
"The book market is oversaturated. We have metrics, and we know how many unread pages people have on their Kindle devices, and what rate they read at. They have queues years long. There are no more books to be sold."
This sounds superficially sensible from the perspective of a giant bookstore that sells every book in the universe, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong.
The book market is not oversaturated. It is undersaturated.
Less people are reading less books now. Men are barely reading at all.
Why?
Because they can't find anything they want to read.
This is the curation problem. There are more books now than ever, but because tradpub is dying, and Amazon publishes anything, readers are now exposed directly to the slushpile.
Publishers used to help readers solve the problem of what to read next by rejecting the bad and the mediocre. If you picked up a novel released by a major publishing house, it might not be to your taste, but you could be pretty sure it wasn't objectively awful.
But around the same time that tradpub lost interest in what people want to read, and started publishing only what they thought people should read, Amazon started eating their lunch.
Not a coincidence.
But Amazon doesn't curate the slushpile.
Why would it? It sells every book, ever. So why would it be interested in promoting some books over others? It gets paid regardless of which book readers buy.
Amazon does not care which book you buy.
Which means it doesn't care whether you buy the book you like.
Which means, in turn, that it doesn't care whether you like the book you buy.
In other words, Amazon-the-bookseller doesn't care about customer satisfaction.
They consider that an author's responsibility. Amazon has replaced the publishers, but it does not see itself as a publisher, with any responsibility to curate, promote, or discriminate, but a neutral vendor.
Amazon has been seduced by its own metrics.
A metric, measures what is, and what has been. It will never tell you what could be.
The book market is not saturated because it is not fixed-size. The number of people who want to read is not a fixed number. The rate at which they read books is not a fixed rate.
Both these numbers are highly variable, and they are driven by one thing... customer satisfaction.
Readers who can find books they love will read more books faster.
The market is not a fixed size. The market can grow.
But to grow the market, someone must solve the curation problem.
Readers would benefit from this, but they are not in a position to do it.
Authors would benefit from this, but they are not in a position to do it.
Amazon would benefit from this, and they are.
If Amazon were to realize that customer satisfaction matters to their bottom line, that it is in their interest to address the curation problem, just as the publishers they have replaced did, they could do it... easily.
They aren't a publishing house, with experienced editors and wordsmiths who can tell the good from the bad. They do not have the ghosts of Gardner Dozois, Tom Dougherty, and Jim Baen on speed dial. They can't decide what is good or bad.
But they have something else.
Something just as powerful.
They have data.
For Amazon-the-bookseller, selling more books isn't a matter of solving the curation problem. It's a matter of doing something even better.
They can solve the discovery problem.
They don't need to figure out what most people will like. They can figure out what you, the individual reader, will like.
They have data, and what they don't have, they can gather. They have expert software engineers and machine learning specialists. They have powerful cloud computing services. They have access to AI that didn't exist five years ago.
Amazon could build the most vast, powerful, and creepily accurate book recommendation engine the world has ever seen.
It could hit every Kindle owner with an endless fire hose of "something else you're gonna love".
In fact, according to that same Amazon insider, it already built the tool.
Years ago.
According to the same Amazon insider, this tool existed. And it was good. Probably not good on the level of what could be built today, but good.
Except Amazon, having this tool, saw no use for it. Because they assumed the book market was saturated.
So, if you think you can't squeeze any more money out of readers, because you think they are reading as fast as they can, where you go for additional revenue?
Authors.
What you do is you take your recommendation engine, and you hand the keys to the advertising department. And they sell those recommendations, charging authors to be seen.
There's two problems with this.
First of all, storytelling is a winner-take-all game. Which means most authors are broke.
Second, once a recommendation means nothing more than "this guy gave us some money", readers stop paying attention to it. And then you have to take it out behind the shed and shoot it, like a sick horse.
Which is precisely what happened.
So now Amazon is selling 50 million books, to fewer and fewer people, because they can't find what they actually want to read.
This is the discovery problem.
Tradpub failed because they stopped solving it. Amazon-the-bookseller is limping along, propped up by Amazon-the-computing-service, because it hasn't solved it either.
Whoever solves it will win.
https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1945290096753697188
