To­day Ar­genti­na's largest news­pa­per, Clarín, print­ed a sto­ry about e-­books ti­tled "The e-­book grows: good news for bad writ­er­s?" and it's wor­thy of com­men­t.

First, the ob­vi­ous: yes, of course it's good news for bad writ­er­s, just like the ar­rival of the in­ter­nal com­bus­tion en­gine was good news for bad rid­er­s, but it's not on­ly good news for bad writ­er­s, it's good news for al­most ev­ery­one.

Let's con­sid­er some choice quotes from this ar­ti­cle:

In the last few months those au­thors pre­vi­ous­ly damned to self­-pub­lish­ing, ei­ther by the low qual­i­ty of their texts of the short­sight­ed­ness of the ed­i­tors, have found [com­pa­nies] will­ing to pro­vide them, in elec­tron­ic for­mat, the pub­lish­ing de­nied to them on pa­per.

Well, yeah, since pub­lish­ing e-­books is al­most free, yet the prices are sub­stan­tial, it will in­crease de­mand of things to pub­lish, be­cause the mar­gin is big­ger. You can "print" hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent books for the cost of a sin­gle pa­per book!

So far, ob­vi­ous but still more or less aligned with re­al­i­ty. It did­n't last, though:

This progress has its vic­tim­s. First the tra­di­tion­al ed­i­tors, who see weak­en­ing their pow­er over the se­lec­tion, pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­bu­tion of book­s.

Whoa, how ter­ri­ble for them. I can on­ly imag­ine they feel aw­ful be­cause their jobs are be­caom­ing more or less ob­so­lete. Then again, so did the copy­ist monks jobs when ed­i­tors and pub­lish­ers start­ed their gig. It last­ed them 500 years, that's a lot.

The idea that the free ac­cess to so­cial net­works turns ev­ery­one in­to mu­si­cian­s, jour­nal­ists or writ­ers makes head­way. At the same time, the role of those who, not long ago seemed called, thanks to their ed­u­ca­tion to chan­nel the de­vel­op­ment of en­ter­tain­men­t, in­for­ma­tion or cul­ture shrinks.

I am com­plete­ly against the very idea of im­par­tial jour­nal­is­m. There is­n't one im­par­tial jour­nal­ist, there nev­er has been one, and there nev­er will be one, so why go on with the cha­rade that yes, you are not im­par­tial, but you pre­tend to be, and we pre­tend to be­lieve it, and then try to cor­rect your bias when read­ing... it's tire­some.

So I, a per­fect­ly bi­ased guy will tell you: OF COURSE, YOU SELF­-SERV­ING NIM­ROD. Ev­ery­one is a writ­er nowa­days. An av­er­age teenag­er writes many times more to­day than when I was a teenag­er. The main method of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with peers has switched from oral to writ­ten! Yes, we old creeps hate how they write, but what the heck, that's be­cause we are di­nosaurs.

You are writ­ing about the plight of bug­gy-whip man­u­fac­tur­er's mid­dle-­man­age­ment in­stead of writ­ing about cars.

Just grow a pair of nut­s, say that this scares the shit out of you be­cause you ex­pect jour­nal­ism to not be a way you can make a liv­ing in 20 years ad be done with it.

In the mean­time, we will all have fun hav­ing a wealth of writ­ing (good and bad) with­out peers in the his­to­ry of civ­i­liza­tion.