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Technology has (or should have) rendered the big publishing houses desperate. When editing, typesetting, printing, marketing, warehousing, shipping, etc was largely beyond the capabilities of an individual author, they served a necessary purpose; and profited accordingly! Now that most of those things are available to one or two people, the only real advantage they have is in marketing; and that only because of the public perception that the only place to get quality material is from them.
So we have the publishing houses desperately casting around for a model that will allow them to maintain their bloated organizations, and still return a decent margin. Stories like this demonstrate that the Agency model is mostly a failure, but until the public becomes aware that indies can be as good or better than the mainstream at half the price or less, the dinosaurs will continue to reign.
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