Nathan Bransford shared this article from GigaOM about the death of book publishers:

Amazon executive Russell Grandinetti gave the most succinct comment about the new world that publishers find themselves in: a wakeup call that should be posted in giant letters in every publishing house and agency. In an interview about Amazon’s moves into signing authors directly, he told the New York Times:

[T]he only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader. Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.