It seems to me there are three big obstacles in the way of removing publishers. The first is the need to ‘project manage’ a book through its long lifetime from the point of a near-complete manuscript to marketing, distribution and sales. Whatever the media involved, this requires skill and focus from someone. The second is the publishing medium. The kinds of synergies and flexibilities you talk about really only take off when the content stays digital and doesn’t end up on paper. At the moment, none of the book readers around is really up to the job, the networks are limited (almost non-existent in rural Australia where I live!) and the computing and storage platforms we have now are excessively complex and fragile. We still have quite a way to go – possibly decades – before we have something that will replace a paper book – and by then the oil will have run out and climate change will have altered our priorities.

The third thing is the authors themselves. They’re not all Corey Doctorows and they don’t all have the inclination to be publishers, designers, publicists, accountants, technicians, and all the other things necessary to do it themselves.

I think you’re right that things are changing – just not at the breakneck speed you seem to suggest.

Graham.

That was a great series of articles, thank you for posting them here.

In the space of niche publication a friend of mine pointed me at a NY T article about Philip M. Parker who, through using AI has published over 200, 000 titles on Amazon aimed at very niche markets. All of the titles are print on demand, and most of them sell less than a dozen copies, but the nature of his method of producing each book means that the cost to him per book is on the order of cents, so a single sale already turns a profit.

It seems like an extreme, but interesting, data point in this context.

- Ian