What follows is just my very uninformed opinion. I'm not a scientist myself, but my interest in CS and math has made me an avid reader of scientific papers and books - whenever they're publicly available, that is.

What publishing houses do is exploit the rules of the social games that scientists themselves willingly play. When the importance of an academic work is judged by the names of its authors, or by the name of the journal in which it is published, or by the presence of fashionable keywords in its title or in the abstract, scientists are giving publishing houses the very rope with which they will be hanged. So, while the behavior of publishing houses is certainly antisocial and most abominable, it is only made possible by the very scientific community that condemns it.

Is there any fundamental reason why scientists can't always submit their papers to the arXiv, and let the web of citations determine their relative importance?