Will Book Publishers Ever Be Irrelevant?

Here's a great article from Gigaom on the direction and future (such as it is) of traditional publishing.

Most interesting are the references to the self publishing tools available to would be authors to bypass the traditional gatekeepers.

Cory Doctorow (science fiction author) argued the processes that had been the province of publishers — editing, publishing, distribution — were now so easily available that self-publishers and others were able to produce very polished material themselves. Publishers still didn’t understand this was happening, which could even mean that the framework of the debate was already pointless: “In some ways we’re already living in a post-publisher world,” he said.