Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Pubs can still evaluate texts, provide editing services, and broker distribution and costs with vendors.
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I see most of those as aspects of paper publishing:
Evaluate texts? Why? Because getting form raw manuscript to thousands of shipped paper books on store shelves is expense, and shelf space is limited. So they need a gatekeeper to prevent them from wasting money on books they predict will not make a profit.
Provide editing services? Yes you still need this with ebooks. The difference is that the publishers provide this service on spec, assuming that they'll recover the cost from the sales. But at the end of day, it's still one person reading the manuscript and recommending changes and does not require the resources of a giant corporation to get the job done.
Broker distribution and costs with vendors? Technically, there's no distribution as such. I'd imagine that in a few years every ebook seller on the web will have established procedures that make it trivial for any author to get their books available for purchase.
I'm surprised you didn't mention artwork, marketing and advertising. Those are things I that giant corporations are good at, and might be a struggle for authors to go alone. On the other hand, in the world of ebooks the role of artwork is probably going to shrink.
The question that I have is whether any publisher is going to be able to take a big enough cut to stay in business when their monopoly on production of the final product is removed? I can see a new kind of business cropping up, an author services company that contracts to the author to handle editing, artwork and advertising - probably for a fee up front and maybe with a small percentage on the sales.