<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>peterarmstrong</author><text>&quot;A rose by any other name...&quot;&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m the author of 2 traditionally-published books.  ISBNs, dead trees, the works.&lt;p&gt;The first one (Flexible Rails) was something I self-published on Lulu as I wrote it.  It started at about 200 pages and ended up over 500 pages before I did a deal with a traditional publisher.&lt;p&gt;At what point was it a book? My publisher approached me about publishing my book, not my manuscript (or rose).  People all over the world bought my book when it was just a PDF.  It made my mortgage payments for a while.  In fact about 70% of my profit over my book&apos;s lifetime was from PDF sales.&lt;p&gt;As its author, I considered it a book when I first published it.  My readers did too.  Publishers like O&apos;Reilly, the Prags and Manning probably consider their beta / early access books to be books.&lt;p&gt;Finally (since I&apos;m typing on a phone), ebooks are to physical books like web apps are to shrinkwrapped software: you can do way more releases.  At what point is a release real?  Our answer is it is when you have paying customers.  That is a commitment to your readers, and it helps you write and keeps you motivated.&lt;p&gt;So, to sum up the ramble: in 5 years almost all books will be ebooks, most will have multiple releases (including before being &quot;finished&quot;), and this author&apos;s opinion will be quaint.</text><parent_chain><item><author>Samuel_Michon</author><text>You&apos;re confusing books with manuscripts. Please don&apos;t call these things you sell &apos;books&apos;.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&quot;A manuscript is not a book. The author&apos;s job is to write the manuscript. The publisher&apos;s job is to turn a series of manuscripts originating from different suppliers into consistently produced books, mass-produce them, and sell them into distribution channels.&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;p&gt;While it&apos;s true that the author is the one with the creative input, they only do about half the work. And the other half of the job is not optional. The reason publishers exist is to provide for division of labour; if I did the other 50% to bring my rough manuscripts up to published-book-quality, I&apos;d only be able to write half as many novels.&quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;As per Charlie Stross, accomplished fiction writer: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-h...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>spatten</author><text>Sounds like a lot of the pain points that Peter Armstrong and I ran into when writing our books, and that we&apos;re trying to solve on Leanpub (&lt;a href=&quot;http://leanpub.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://leanpub.com&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s free to sign up, you write your book in Markdown and we convert it into PDF, epub and mobi for you. We pay you 90% - $0.50 for sales on our site.&lt;p&gt;You can put it on the iBookstore and Kindle store yourself (or be patient for a few weeks and we&apos;ll do that and provide an ISBN for you as well...).&lt;p&gt;If you&apos;ve already written your book in HTML, we can convert it to Markdown for you automatically -- throw your HTML files into a Dropbox folder and click a button on Leanpub.&lt;p&gt;As for technical editors, our approach is to publish early (before you&apos;re done the book, preferably before you&apos;ve written 100 pages) and have your readers function as development editors.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s not a complete solution (yet), but I think we would have saved you tons of pain.&lt;p&gt;Drop me a line (scott@leanpub.com) if you have any questions.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>E-books Are Not That Easy</title><url>http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2012/01/e-book-publishi.php</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>JoshTriplett</author><text>Such a distinction might exist in the traditional publishing world (the one with a sign &quot;deposit manuscripts here&quot; right above the trash can), but no such distinction exists in an all-electronic medium.  Authors produce books; editors, illustrators, graphic designers, and others might provide help that improves the quality of the book, but they don&apos;t magically imbue it with a &quot;book&quot; status that it didn&apos;t already have.</text><parent_chain><item><author>Samuel_Michon</author><text>You&apos;re confusing books with manuscripts. Please don&apos;t call these things you sell &apos;books&apos;.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&quot;A manuscript is not a book. The author&apos;s job is to write the manuscript. The publisher&apos;s job is to turn a series of manuscripts originating from different suppliers into consistently produced books, mass-produce them, and sell them into distribution channels.&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;p&gt;While it&apos;s true that the author is the one with the creative input, they only do about half the work. And the other half of the job is not optional. The reason publishers exist is to provide for division of labour; if I did the other 50% to bring my rough manuscripts up to published-book-quality, I&apos;d only be able to write half as many novels.&quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;As per Charlie Stross, accomplished fiction writer: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-h...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>spatten</author><text>Sounds like a lot of the pain points that Peter Armstrong and I ran into when writing our books, and that we&apos;re trying to solve on Leanpub (&lt;a href=&quot;http://leanpub.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://leanpub.com&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s free to sign up, you write your book in Markdown and we convert it into PDF, epub and mobi for you. We pay you 90% - $0.50 for sales on our site.&lt;p&gt;You can put it on the iBookstore and Kindle store yourself (or be patient for a few weeks and we&apos;ll do that and provide an ISBN for you as well...).&lt;p&gt;If you&apos;ve already written your book in HTML, we can convert it to Markdown for you automatically -- throw your HTML files into a Dropbox folder and click a button on Leanpub.&lt;p&gt;As for technical editors, our approach is to publish early (before you&apos;re done the book, preferably before you&apos;ve written 100 pages) and have your readers function as development editors.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s not a complete solution (yet), but I think we would have saved you tons of pain.&lt;p&gt;Drop me a line (scott@leanpub.com) if you have any questions.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>E-books Are Not That Easy</title><url>http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2012/01/e-book-publishi.php</url></story>