What's Paper Got to Do With It?

Last week, I met with my friend, who shall remain nameless for no reason other than I haven't told him that I would be trumpeting his name to my millions of followers. I'll just make up a name: Larry Shames. Damn! That really is his name. Oh, well.
Along with a busy career as a ghostwriter, Larry is the author of a series of eight crime novels set in Key West. But his most recent title is off-genre for him--that is, not a part of his series--and Larry has decided to epublish it.
"Up until eighteen months ago, I was a snob," he told me. "I thought if you weren't published on paper, you weren't really a writer. But I've totally changed my mind. Traditional publishing is dead." I won't claim that this is an exact quote, but it's very close. Close enough to avoid charges of libel, anyway. Larry, if you're out there, please correct me.
It wasn't as though his insight was a surprise. However, it was reassuring to me to hear it from yet another  who is established, and has a solid record of sales over a long period of time.
Over lunch, we spoke for a couple of hours about writing and publishing. Among the smart things Larry has done is to release his backlist as ebooks, which involved, first, securing the rights from his publisher. Having accomplished that, he had the books scanned and formatted, and had new cover art designed. All of it was accomplished by a company called geniusbookservices.com. They did a great job on his books, and when I'm ready--which will be soon--I expect I'll use them.
As for quality of writing, let me pervert the Tina Turner song from the 90s: "What's paper got to do with it?" There are thousands upon thousands of well-written ebooks. And, it's true, there are thousands upon thousands of poorly written ones.
Obviously, with no barrier to entry, anyone can epublish, so there's a lot of drek out there, supporting the position that writers need gatekeepers, in the form of agents and editors, to vet their work before unleashing it on the unwary public. But the market does have wisdom: witness Joe Konrath, Amanda Hocking, and, I hope, Larry Shames, and me.
When the gatekeepers work for and serve just a half-dozen giant conglomerates it can only be expected that their standards will change, and that the gate will get narrower. The result, of course, has been that publishers have gone the way of the film industry, spending all their money on a few brand name writers, then tossing crumbs to the rest, who will be lucky if they earn back their piddling advance.
The big names don't even make back their multi-million dollar advances, but the publishing giants would be too embarrassed to let them go.  Can you say, "John Carter?"  That is, for those who are not movie buffs, a reference to the recent flop John Carter, which cost Disney $250 million (at least), and cost studio head Rich Ross his job. I'm not worried about Rich Ross. He'll fail upward. But squandering that sum of money on a film is, of course, analogous to publishers squandering millions on a title by a name-brand writer not because it's great, but because it'll be a tent pole, a profit center (they hope) and a builder of prestige. Meanwhile, a couple hundred writers who would have been thrilled to get a $10,000 advance are out in the cold; like John Carter, shivering on Mars. Big pub--as people more worthy than I have observed--has forsaken its responsibility to find and nurture new talent, and to expand the art form. It has succumbed to the same blockbuster, shopping mall, commodification, fast food mentality that has, and continues to, destroy individuality not just in culture, but in commerce as well.
I suppose this is a little like railing against gravity. There clearly are economic, technological, and cultural reasons that traditional publishing has taken this route. But ebooks give writers the chance to escape their particular gravitational pull.
Maybe there's a happy medium. Agents, as in Larry's case, are moving into more of a publishing model. They're still gatekeepers, but are not beholden to big pub. Without the overhead of publishers, or the costs of printing, perhaps the market will create an opportunity for them to once again discover and develop new talent, and earn the allegiance of readers and writers alike.