General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: One of the world's biggest banks just admitted bitcoin could destroy existing finance firms [View all]hunter
(38,442 posts)... I am very much enjoying "Books on Demand."
People are experimenting and taking risks in ways major publishers never would, and many older public domain works are being republished, often as labors of love, recreating older styles of typography and artwork, electronically yes, but that's an art too.
My wife and I frequently buy art from local artists, and thrift store art too. When the price of producing music reached a point where artists could produce and sell their own CDs, no middleman involved, we started buying music that way too. Now it's possible to buy books like that. Yep, maybe it's hard on the traditional music publishers, and the traditional book publishers, but the vast majority of artists, musicians, and authors were never going to be accepted to the "big leagues," and the vast majority of older books were never going to be reprinted.