The problem is they DID give up control. They can't cackle with glee and go off and slap old books up at Amazon, unless they were "lucky" enough to go out of print in the 1990s before publishers starting locking things up.
I was lucky because under my deals, I get rights back after seven years no matter what. So I'll lose a combined, er, 30 years or so worth of ebook income I could have had (for some bizarre reason, the publisher is not even making the ebooks available after the paper copies go out of print). Based on a couple of months of selling a few of my own books, I predict this will cost me maybe $60,000 over those seven years, or more than I made on the advances for those books. For this reason, I don't think signing a book deal is an automatic no-brainer anymore.
Yes, my agent was an idiot, but I was a bigger idiot, because I knew changes were coming. They just came a lot faster than I figured, and most authors have this crazy idea they are going to break out, get publisher love, and all their books will always be in print and in the stores.
In some ways, getting published was the worst thing I could have ever done for my writing career...
Scott Nicholson
hauntedcomputer.blogspot.com