Pulp fiction in the digital age | China Daily

The article (link below) is a bit mind-blowing when you read the scale of things in China. It starts out reporting the demise of a digital author who worked himself to, well, death…

Pulp fiction in the digital age|Society|chinadaily.com.cn.

There is a great deal of illumination and unvarnished truth in this piece. In some ways it defines the edges of the new publishing frontier better than almost anything else you can find on the Internet. The result of literally millions of people thinking they can make a killing in the e-book world means viciously low quality work in every genre and category you stumble into on Amazon or iBooks or Smashwords — in China and elsewhere.

Worse, if you really do have a committed interest in producing high-quality literature for general consumption by intelligent readers, the rabble writers just in there to make a lot of money buries you under their five million boots and oodles of variations on the dogged belief that anyone can write a novel.

China is roughly five years behind much of the rest of the world with digital books. It’s important to realize, though, that that market is by far and away the biggest in the world. How things shake out there with e-books may determine a great deal about how things shake out for the rest of us.