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more important in the digital world. Lost in the doomsdayer debate about publishers’ future is that their unique role as intermediaries has always been about discovering and promoting talent and content
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See this is what bothers me, and continues to bother me about these people commenting on the publishing industry and how it can adapt. None of them can actually envision a point where we don't need the publishing companies at all. We've had this 'intermediary' for going on 100 years now, and it's not about discovering and promoting talent...it never was and never will be. It was, and is always about bottom lines, what will sell the most units. That's why we get so many bland knock-offs of what has come before, why the shelves are crammed to bursting with celebrity biographies and flavour-of-the-month fiction.
Promoting talent? It's bs PR talk at its finest. They're all terrified that readers will take over the role of discovery and authors will promote themselves. Once that happens, what use are publishers in a digital age? Why have one more barrier between creator and audience that is no longer needed?
Someone posted in an earlier thread that the ebook world was like the Wild Wild West, and I have only one thing to say to that --
YEE-HAW!!!