There've been several author blog responses the WSJ article, including Kristine Kathryn Rusch
telling him where he can stuff that idea ("The literary tastemakers—the editors, publishers, reviewers, etc—are seeing their control of what’s being read vanish, so they’re writing articles like this one. Honestly, it’s becoming the evergreen story of the year. Don’t know what to write for your weekly blog? Let’s write about the way that electronic publishing/indie publishing/self-publishing is ruining books for the rest of us.")
And David Gaughran points out
the terrible developments since the rise of self-publishing, including "no more disappearing genres" and "fair pay for writers" and "bigger selection for readers."
I believe there *is* a niche--a profitable one, even--for curating books, for telling people "this is worth reading, that is not." But it's going to need to be a lot more customized than the big publishing companies have been in the past, and it's going to have to be based on something other than "this book will make me, the curator, money from sales."
A small startup could start selling subscriptions to recommendation lists, tailored to individual people's preferences--pay $10/month, get a list of 10 books/week within your genre(s) of choice, limited by your prefs--no-DRM only, or ePub/ADE only, or Kindle only, or even "nothing by Macmillan."
Of course, that's not *publishing.* That's the curation part that was always folded into publishing, with the "not worth our time" choices not getting *any* audience. Now, those books all have the chance to find an audience.
Did photography studios collapse when portable, individual cameras became cheap? Has the movie industry gone bankrupt since everyone got access to video recorders? Mygods, we have them on phones now; surely that's the end of the big-picture era. Too bad there are no more summer blockbusters being released.
Wait, those haven't happened. Hmm. Apparently, curation isn't the *only* thing that keeps a media production company in business.