The latest marketplace data would seem to say publishers are as strong as ever - The Shatzkin Files The Shatzkin Files

For a period of a few years that probably ended two or three years ago, we saw individual authors regularly crashing bestseller lists with self-published works. Some, like Amanda Hocking, parlayed their bootstrap efforts into significant publishing contracts. Others, like Hugh Howey, focused on building their own little enterprise and tried to use the publishing establishment for what it could do that a self-publisher couldn't. (In what was certainly a very rare arrangement of this kind with a major indie author, Howey made a print-only deal for his bestseller, "Wool", with Simon & Schuster. And he made foreign territory and language deals and Hollywood deals as well.) And we know that there were, and are, a slew of indie authors who self-publish through Amazon and don't even bother to buy ISBN numbers to get universal distribution under a single title identifier, effectively keeping them out of bookstores.