The only function current publishers really serve is printing and distribution. Editing and formatting can be done elsewhere, and new-style literary agents will still exist to handle marketing and promotion to online gatekeepers such as the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph. You’ll soon start to hear about writers who achieve fame without ever having a physical book printed, just as stories have trickled in about musicians who’ve never had a recording contract.

Since hardly any authors make real money from writing books even with publishing contracts, it’s hard to see the point of publishing companies once the print format starts to die out. Bring it on!

“Published books,” unless someone notes otherwise, include a huge number of self-published books, books published by university presses and scientific journals that aren’t expected to turn a profit, and books published by small/start-up publishers that don’t tend to last very long.

If you weeded it down to major publishers, i.e. the ones you’ll find on the shelves at Barnes & Noble, I’m sure the statistic would be far less imposing.

Although things may change, we’re years and years away from seeing any real shift away from reading paper books. This is what’s really going to happen: hard core readers such as myself, who are actually responsible for a disproportionate number of the books that are sold every year, will or have already bought e-ink devices and similar as an adjunct to their already existing paper habit. Those who like to read but are only much more occasional in their reading habits will read some material on multi-purpose devices like the iphone, but will also still buy paper books. And either way we’re still going to need publishers.

If the publishers all somehow died off (a stunningly unlikely event) and ‘writers started doing it for themselves’, eventually someone would see the need to create a business model for an organisation to filter out all the crap and figure out what the good stuff is. And lo, the publishers would be reborn.