I'd like a new model for academic publishing. Normally, two of the most important roles of a publisher are quality control (hopefully), and marketing. In acad

I'd like a new model for academic publishing. Normally, two of the most important roles of a publisher are quality control (hopefully), and marketing. In academics, mechanisms are probably already in place to take care of both of these functions. In any case, distribution should no longer be an important part of the services a publisher provides. For academic publishing, then, the most important function of a publisher may be to provide the actual physical form of the book. This is the new model: let the authors compete on the quality of their content, and let the publishers compete on the physical quality and price of the books they publish. Let the authors keep the rights to the books, but let them then allow many different publishers to compete with different form factors and prices for the books. Maybe then we would get much lower prices for higher quality physical books.