a) There are about a dozen different industries flying in loose formation and termed "publishing" -- academic press is not like mass market fiction press, or newspapers, or magazines, or self-improvement books or textbooks. The web is the latest and most rapidly changing delivery vehicle but it crosses all of these lines. Beware of thinking of "the web" as a publishing sector; rather, it's a mechanism for delivering the content to the reader's eyeballs, much like offset-litho printing.

b) Today's publishing industry runs on the set of business practices that didn't cause someone [else] to go bust at some point over the past 150 years. It may look archaic and weird, but it's that way for a whole bunch of reasons that looked good at some time.

More here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...