I'd suggest that while authors love this story, regular folks might find it... indifferent.
Well of course they MIGHT. People might be indifferent to ANY story.
I disagree that this one is more likely to leave people indifferent, though. I'm no author and I loved it. The world building was fascinating, especially with the parallels to the way the current publishing world is already going (yes, machines exist where you can print books on demand...). A playfully imaginative exploration of a possible future for the publishing industry.
Great reading too.
And to add another datapoint to that analysis, I'm an author and I didn't like the story. Which just goes to show, generalizations are always flawed. Always. Although I suppose one could debate about whether I deserve the title of "author", since I have yet to gain anything resembling widespread acclaim in the community or out.
I held on until about halfway through it, but all it seemed like was an author's blog post responding to a rant he'd heard from someone else. So I wasn't terribly surprised to hear:
I wrote this story during Clarion West, partly as a response to a doom and gloom speech I heard on the future of the publishing industry.
Like a typical blog post, it felt like a narcissistic complaining rant that you would hear from someone over a couple beers. Like a typical blog post, the arguments made are so incredibly exaggerated. Like a typical blog post, it's so easily dated that in a few years it won't mean much of anything (which I'd guessed from the "eBookalypse" in the title). Can you tell that I don't (generally) like blogs?
It didn't help that I found all of the dialog and some of the wording choices awkward.
