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One of the major value of publishers (at least for the consumer) is windowing out the dross. For a while several years ago, Baen Books ran an experiment of allowing certain fans to read through the slush pile (i.e. reading through the unsolicited manuscripts to see if there was anything remotely decent). Needless to say, the vast majority is dross.
Amazon has this issue. The vast majority of self published books is pretty bad. Amazon doesn't seem to particularly care all that much about quality. Their business model seems to be more oriented to people looking for specific books or authors.
Baen Books has (or had) such a loyal following because they provided books of a known quality and type. If you are an author of the type of book that Baen Books use to publish, then you got a built in audience. I suspect that Tor is well on it's way to the same support over the past several years. Many of the major genre imprints provide the same thing for their authors, a built in audience.
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