Fuck them. "Publishing" has been something of a shady business for quite some time now. Why do you think it costs the same for a digital copy of a book as it does for a hard copy? It sure as hell doesn't cost anything to print or ship or shelve an ebook. Do you know who gets to pocket the extra? Not the author. Price fixing is illegal, yet it's perfectly allowed when publishers do it. The fact is that they have been cheating the system in many ways for a long time, and it's just now starting to catch up with them a little.

Publishers have been cultivating an air of elitism that simply can't survive the modern technological era when anyone can publish their book online. They treat authors like so much slave labor who ought to be grateful for the chance to be published at all.

Publishers are filthy middlemen, and they deserve to fail. Let authors publish their own books, and charge what people are willing to pay instead of pricing shenanigans and par lour tricks.

Publishers should be clamoring to get authors, and not the other way around. It's somehow the only business where the salesman is more revered than the product.