User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-31010985-20190928203157/@comment-6032121-20191003212747

Amorkuz:

First and most importantly, what User:Bwburke94 said. Which is also stated in the opening post, for that matter. Namely: you may wish it were otherwise for reasons known only to you, but we do not currently have a policy that says commercial self-publishing isn't a mode of release we care about, a notion that is frankly bordering on the oxymoron (something self-published is by definition published; it's in the name).

All our rules currently say about what counts as an "official release" is that something's officially released when it has been made available to the public in a commercial format. If you want to add more clauses to what kind of publisher does or does not count (I'm using "publisher" in the wide sense of "entity which legally publishes things", not the narrow legalese sense you outlined above), that is a wholly other debate, but in the meantime, Tardis:You are bound by current policy. As far as this debate is concerned, nothing in Tardis's rules prohibits self-publishers. That may change someday, though by all appearances, the bulk of the community has yet to be convinced of why this would be a good idea. But for now, this is an inclusion debate applying the rules as they stand.

Second, please explain why whether its publishings in a repository of data called Books in Print should have any bearings on discussion on an online publisher. (Whether you like it or not, webnovels and ebooks are a major part of what literature is in the modern world. You can't just say something's not a "proper" book because it doesn't exist in print.)

Third, you write: "Instead, they are published by various imprints of Amazon, not by Arcbeatle Press". Okay, so the books are published by Amazon then. In other words, rather than a tiny publisher, they are, by your legalese definition of publisher, released by a big, multi-billion-dollar publisher. This supports your side of the debate how?