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Originally Posted by stonetools
1. Offering a vertical, one stop solution converting an author's unedited manuscript into an an actual book at a store
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For a start, that assumes that the big chain stores (B&N, Walmart, etc) continue to be a major market. Indie book stores are growing while chains are shrinking, and indie stores are more open to selling indie books. Big chains are the only market that trade publishers have a near-monopoly over.
You also assume that a publisher would tarnish whatever reputation it has with readers by publishing any old crap for cash. Since most of those books wouldn't sell, they wouldn't be able to benefit from economies of scale with large print runs, so they'd need a whole PoD infrastructure and would basically just be another Createspace.
Or by 'unedited' did you mean they'd still do editing before printing it?
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2. Sharing the financial risk at developing books that require extensive research and expense to write.
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True, though that mostly applies to non-fiction.
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There's a kind of exaltation of self pubbers here that misses the fact that most self pubbers:
1. Write popular genre fiction and nothing else.
2. Actually aspire to work with trad publishers if they had a choice.
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Most trade-published writers write popular genre fiction and nothing else. Most of them don't even have the option of writing anything else because their publisher won't buy anything but 'the same book as last time only different'. If Stephen King decides to write a literary novel about gay elephants they'll buy it without a second thought, but if Joe Midlist does the same instead of writing the sci-fi novels he's been writing before, the publisher will laugh.
Also, I don't know many self-publishers who want to become mid-list trade published writers making $10,000 a book. Offer them $1,000,000 and most would jump at the deal, but just about anyone would in that situation.