Cherish the Book Publishers Before They're Gone

The Wall Street Journal says we'll miss them in this e-book world.

From the piece...

It's only natural for those locked out to despise the gatekeepers, but what about those of us in the reading public? Shouldn't we be grateful that it's someone else's job to weed out the inane, the insipid, the incompetent? Not that they always do such a great job of it, given some of the books that do get published by actual publishers. But at least they provide some buffer between us and the many aspiring authors who are like the wannabe pop stars in the opening weeks of each "American Idol" season: How many instant novelists are as deluded as the singers who make with the strangled-cat noises believing they have Arethaen pipes?

A friend, years ago, worked at a major New York publishing house tending the slush pile. It was her job to peruse the unsolicited manuscripts for anything that might be a hidden gem, and to send the dreaded form letters to the rest. She took no pleasure in sending rejections and was eager to find something, anything, worthy in the pile. She dreamed of discovering the great undiscovered talent—oh, what a story (and a career) it would make! Alas, in two years of sifting she found only one marginally plausible submission she could recommend to her bosses.

The e-book era promises us all the pleasure of wading through the slush pile ourselves, even as the pile grows exponentially. Much of that growth comes from eager literary hopefuls making earnest efforts. But spammers are also making their contribution to the teeming digital library. As Reuters recently reported, some unscrupulous self-publishers have begun creating books by the ream merely by grabbing a few pages of text from websites and dumping them into ultraquickie e-books. The authors of such faux tomes can knock out 10 or 20 a day. And even if only a handful of people make the mistake of downloading one of these "books," the spammer still makes enough pennies to keep at it.