This week, Mark Coker posted a new entry to the Smashwords blog detailing the rise of self-publishing and discussing the broken model upon which big publishing is built. From the article:
If authors – the beating heart powering Big Publishing – lose faith in Big Publishing, then big publishing as we know it will die. [...]

For the last century, publishers controlled the means of book production and book distribution. If authors wanted to reach readers, they had no choice but to kneel before the publishing oligopolists who had the power to determine who got published, and what readers read. The system worked fantastically well for the publishers, [. . .] but less well for the authors they published, and even less well for the vast majority of authors who could never gain access to the cliquey club of the published.