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Originally Posted by Robert22
But when you decide to read a particular book, how often is your decision based on the fact that Random House is the publisher? You may partially base reading a book on a publisher if that publisher specializes in a genre that you like.
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Not just genre, but quality & style within a genre. Even before I got involved with ebooks, I knew I could barely tolerate anything by Llewellyn but I needed to keep aware of their publications because they were going to be hot topics for discussion. I could trust Weiser to have accurate info in their books, and would be willing to try a new author published by New Falcon if the blurb was on a topic I had an interest in. Harper Collins published some feminist Pagan books that were pretty much top of their niche. New Page was... apparently stuff that couldn't get past Llewellyn's editors, and considering Llewellyn brought us the "ancient Irish potato goddess," that's a frightening concept. Capall Bann was the trustworthy UK publisher of Pagan/occult books; they weren't directly available in the US.
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So why do we need publishers for ebooks again? 
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"Publishers" we probably don't need. We do need editors & promoters, and people sort among genre styles for very specific tastes.
"Mysteries" is a biiiig genre; a publisher (or whatever it winds up being called) could specialize in several types: closed suspects stories where everyone's on a train or a boat, or manhunts where suspects scatter across the country, or romance crossovers where the tensions build between one suspect and the mystery-solver, or thrillers where the focus is on the horrific acts as much as finding the person who commits them. A publisher's logo on the cover (or the download link) would let you know "all clues for this mystery will be given to you by halfway through the book so you can figure it out for yourself; no final-chapter secrets." Or "maybe they *won't* catch the bad guy; sometimes he gets away before they figure him out." Or maybe, "lots of clever, snappy dialogue, and no boring technical details; light fun reading only." Or it could mean "the historical details will be excruciatingly accurate."
A lot of readers aren't even aware of those kinds of conventions; they just know they like books in a couple of series, and tried something else by a Famous Author and didn't care for it.
*Someone* needs to do that level of fine sorting, and a lot of us would prefer to leave the task to someone else, rather than read a third of a random book before discovering it's not to our taste.
I knew I could enjoy anything by New Falcon, and was likely to cringe at anything by Llewellyn. There were exceptions--Llewellyn's published a handful of terrific books--but I could count on word-of-mouth to tell me about those, and otherwise bypass their whole catalog.
As self-publishing grows, we need more, not less, genre-sorting and filters. We don't need publishers to control access anymore, but we still need someone to say, "you there, don't waste your time with these--they're well-written, but you're probably not interested." I don't have time to read a sample of every new book released, not even in my favorite genres. I want *someone* to put them into categories.
For now? I read a lot of fanfic. That gets levels of categorical tagging that mainstream publishing doesn't even imagine.