Child of a Metal God

Yes, but "publishing" can cover a broad range of organizations. Right now there are legacy forces which are keeping the huge old publishing houses going, but I think they're going to crumble as dramatically as the newspaper business once those are broken. Namely, once etexts get going enough to break their hold on the physical supply chain. It's *hard* to get copies of books into bookstores. Once physical books become boutique items and the majority of readers are buying -- and browsing, which is a separate post -- online, that will be reduced. Likewise, physical production is hard, particularly as we've be trained to reject anything without super-expensive production values, see above in this thread. It's simply much, much easier to produce a professional looking PDF than a professional looking -- and feeling -- book. Lastly, right now we have this weird snobbery about being a "real" author who has "really" been published. For some reason literature never glamorized being "indie", so being self-published is still this huge mark of shame. (This largely seems perpetuated by authors themselves, which seems rather self-serving of them.) That will obviously take some time to fall away as well.