The current mass media such as t elevision, books, and magazines are one-directional, and are produced by a centralized process. This can be positive, since respected editors can filter material to ensure consistency and high quality, but more widely accessible narrowcasting to specific audiences could enable livelier decentralized discussions. Democratic processes for presenting opposing views, caucusing within factions, and finding satisfactory compromises are productive for legislative, commercial, and scholarly pursuits.

So ultimately, I wound up not doing a lot with my stories… until I stumbled across a newsletter article on substack talking about how people were serializing their novels on newsletters, because the new newsletter-subscription models let them sell directly to fans without using Amazon or Wattpad or Patreon as a middleman.

One site of that erosion, which may help explain ebook reticence, can be found in self-published books. For people predisposed to sneer at the practice, a lack of editing or the absence of publisher endorsement and review might justify self-published works’ second-class status. That matter is debatable. More clear is the consequence of disintermediation: Nobody takes a self-published manuscript and lays it out for printing in a manner that conforms with received standards. And so you often end up with a perfect-bound Word doc instead of a book. That odd feeling of impropriety isn’t necessarily a statement about the trustworthiness of the writer or their ideas, but a sense of dissonance at the book as an object. It’s an eerie gestalt, a foreboding feeling of unbookiness.

John Murray's publication, in 1859, of two seminal works:  Darwin's The Origin of Species, and the original self-help book, Samuel Smiles's Self-Help, with Illustrations of Character and Conduct. Smiles's book, now somewhat less familiar than Darwin's, tapped into a Victorian trend for self-improvement, and was a best-seller in its day.

However, in the present era of publishing, those rights are consistently being called into question. Gennaro (2012) is particularly frank about how copyright law has come to privilege publishers at the expense of those who created the work in the first place: ‘Once you have transferred copyright to a journal [in order to publish] you cannot ethically use the words that you have written in another journal article; you no longer own those words’ (p. 109). Nevertheless, Bently (1994) remarks on Roland Barthes’ contention that once text has been published, the words no longer belong to that author or anyone else for that matter.