So: the proprietor of The Daily Aggravation (who, full disclosure, is a friend) has a post up responding to my post from last week on eBooks and the meaning of “out of print” in an increasingly digital world. Late in it, this question is posed:
I often wonder if some of the more punk rock (for lack of a better categorization) authors would be better off simply acting as their own publisher, hence retaining all profits and rights- similar to how an independent band might operate. Authors like Noah Cicero and Tao Lin are finding their audience with no help from large scale publishers, and they are just as credible to me as any author that is published by a large house.
Looking at this in light of this post (and Patrick from Vromans’s comments on it), I do wonder whether there’s room for some sort of middle ground in the process. (I will freely admit here that I have no idea what form this middle ground might take.) Though there’s also, I’d think, a fairly major distinction to be made here between publishing with a small press and self-publishing…
[Update: I had no idea this announcement was coming from The Book Oven today, but it certainly seems to fit in with what's being debated here.]