Quote:
Originally Posted by drofgnal
I think you've hit the nail on the head. You can forsee a future where major publishing houses are not needed to get a book to market, particularly with ebooks. I was the other day looking for a CJ Cherryh's Downbelow Station. She has some of here lesser known works on Amazon for Kindle, but not her award winner. (Hugo). Lo and behold, she has a web site where she explains she is setting up a system to distribute here ebooks on her own.
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Well, that works out just swell... when you're a writer who already has a reputation.
I won't say that working with a publisher is the
only way to build a reputation, but so far the biggest successes of Internet-based self-promotion are things like
Chocolate Rain and the
Tron Guy. 
I.e. I expect that in the future, building and managing a truly national or international following is still going to require resources (finances, skills, networking, PR, marketing, etc) far beyond the ken of most individual creators.
In addition, some type of filtration is always going to be required. Self-published works are, for better or worse, an undifferentiated seething mass of works that takes tremendous effort to wade through. Again this does not need to exclusively lie in the hands of the publishers, but they do have more experience and fewer conflicts of interest with this task than, say, retailers.
As to the idea that "publishers want control," that's sort of like saying "dogs want food."
Everyone in the process wants control over numerous aspects -- publishers, retailers, authors, distributors, critics and readers. That's just a given; i.e. there is nothing wrong with maneuvers to gain control, as long as they are basically done legally and honor the existing rights. E.g. to me, pirating a book because it's out in hardcover but not an ebook isn't a legit protest, because it hurts not only the publishers, but also the retailers and, most importantly, the author. Or a retailer can slash ebook prices to pressure publishers to permanently lower ebook wholesale pricing, but can't legitimately withhold payments in order to force the same change.