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Originally Posted by Tom Swift
You know, why do we even need publishers anymore? You could have editor groups that would choose books and edit them and guarantee that the books are of a higher standard. Then the author could do with them as they will. Sell them to a printer, or a print on demand or a electronic company. Or there could be companies that would do this for him for a cut. This is probably why the publishers don't want to go with electronic books. They know their business is obsolete in the future.
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I've been saying that for quite some time now.
Today, in the pBook world, publishers have value in that they make printing books cost effective. Remember from history class, before the printing press, if you wanted a copy of a book, you paid someone to copy it by hand.
But in the eBook world, the cost of "printing" an eBook is almost zero. What value does a publisher bring an eBook? I can't see any.
I do see the value that a publisher may bring an author, but as a reader, why do I care? For the author, that's a cost of doing business and it's not a reason for me to pay more for an eBook.
My view of the eBook publishing industry is that the author writes the eBook on his word processor, saves it into a standard file format (like ODF) which he sends to a place like Fictionwise to handle the transactions with the readers.