The New Publishers.

This article discusses the development of the self-publishing paradigm, as of March 2004. Self-publishing is mainstream but organizations are the ones doing the publishing. The fascinating thing about the paradigm is that getting stuff out there is both much easier and more difficult than the publishing in the past. Production has gotten much easier; the author of a book or paper bangs out the manuscript on a computer, emails it to an editor and proofreader, makes the required changes and the material gets posted on a Web site. Billions of Web pages and tens of thousands of books are published each year. All sorts of organizations are now publishers in every sense of the word. For example, the Microsoft corporate site has reams of detailed information on viruses, works and other pests that plague its products. As a new form of grassroots politics has emerged on the Web, the political Web site has become an important new publisher. Academic papers go straight to university sites, bypassing the traditional journal publishing process. Pharmaceutical companies publish detailed information about their products on well-organized sites for health care professionals and the general public.