Who Needs a Publisher Anymore?

Newsweek takes note of the ever-growing self-publishing market and how it's gained oodles of respectability.

From the piece...

Until recently, reviewers and booksellers looked down on self-published authors the way Anna Wintour scorns Dress Barn. Now new writers and established authors alike are increasingly taking publishing into their own hands, and the publishing establishment is paying attention. According to a recent Bowker report, the market for “nontraditional books” in the United States grew by more than 750,000 new titles in 2009—a 181 percent increase over 2008. Five of the top 100 bestsellers in the Kindle store—which now produces more sales than Amazon’s hardcover list—are currently self-published.

Bob Young, CEO of print-on-demand service Lulu.com, says that the publishing and distributing of books online will not be the old book industry on a new platform. It will be a new industry, dependent not on bestsellers but on niche publications. Young compares Lulu to eBay, which many feared would kill the traditional auction business. “Ten years and 60 billion transactions on eBay later,” Young says, “Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and the farm auctioneers are still doing fine. That’s because it was not people with Picassos who were selling on eBay. And in our case, it won’t be John Grisham selling millions of copies on Lulu.”