Comment by zbentley

> pricing is determined by what someone else will pay for something

That’s so reductive that even Keynes would probably take issue.

Discoverability is the axis of competition in this context, not price. The market has not effectively found out how to identify quality in order to price it, so externalities rule instead: pre-existing authors with recognizable names, whatever genre publishers like at a given moment (famously disconnected from what people actually want to buy), how many energy drinks a crabby editor has had by the time they get to your manuscript, and so on.

Search engine and recommendation systems were supposed to ameliorate those externalities. They didn’t.