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Originally Posted by Ankh
I did not denigrate the work of professionals needed for the process. I have a very low opinion of usefulness and need for the bulky infrastructure of a full blown corporation where small indie shops are cranking out the goods of the comparable technical quality (NOT comparable quality of the story and authors). Those various suited marketing types (who obviously have no clue how to deal with ebooks), "movers and shakers", agents, human resources personnel, building security costs, janitorial services and myriad of other small costs that tend to accumulate for a bulky, big corporation... I don't think that market is ready to pay for.
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See, this is just nonsense. (And somewhat arrogant, too). Despite your assertions concerning "bulky" infrastructure, and your unwarranted claims that "suited marketing types" "obviously have no clue how to deal with ebooks," big publisher have *tripled* their sales of e-books in the past year, and they have done so while (mostly) adopting the agency model and substantially raising prices on the most popular books.
I'm not thrilled with this approach, but it has obviously been very successful so far.
Someone actually does know what they are doing.
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BTW, I am not writing these posts out of some abstract idealism. This is a straight application of similar predictions for my very own profession, where we might easily end up in "contractor economy". We might easily lose the permanency of our jobs and be employed on per product, or project, basis. It is more cost-effective model, and long-term planning has long time ago been thrown out, to make space for any possible optimization and quick profit in return.
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I don't know whether this will happen in your profession, but claims like this have been made before - specifically, that iTunes and similar mp3 providers would allow musicians to bypass expensive publishers and sell directly to consumers. But by and large these claims haven't panned out - a very small number of already established musicians (i.e., Radiohead) have sold directly to their consumers...but it seems that the vast majority of people still want music put out by traditionally published musicians. (They may want them for free...but they still want those groups and not "Jimmy and the Self-Producers".)
Some indie authors will undoubtedly find success self-publishing, and some established authors who have lost their publishing deals may go this way as well. But just as podiobooks.com has not hurt audible.com at all (if anything, it has probably driven people to audible), indie books aren't going to drive people away from traditionally published books. What people want, and will pay for, are high quality well-edited books. Traditional publishers are and will remain the source of these books because there's not really another option. (As even Cory Doctorow's experiment seems to have shown.)