Even before I finish reading, I can tell you this: Fifty Shades of Grey is the end of the publishing industry as we know it . The fat lady is singing, the tipping point is in the rear-view mirror.

By now you've probably heard of Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. To recap: independently e-published romance featuring explicit BDSM comes out of nowhere to massive e-sales, mainstream publishers fight for hard-copy rights to the tune of 7 figures, movie rights start bidding up, everyone and her supposedly-staid mother is talking about it.

The best overview of the last 4 decades of the fiction publishing industry is Extruded Books: a cautionary tale by Tom Simon and the follow-up:

For some thirty years now, I have been following the commercial publishing industry, particularly in its various New York mutations, and trying (for commercial reasons of my own) to figure out why apparently intelligent people would do business in such cockeyed ways. I don’t pretend to have figured out the whole story, but I have pieced together a good deal of evidence, and I believe I can point out the major turnings in the road that led publishers to the pass they are in today. ... All names have been changed to protect the manifestly guilty; so let me introduce you to Nathan Extruded, founder and publisher of Extruded Books.

By 1986 or so, the crucial step of getting through the slushpile -- where new writers come from -- is becoming much more difficult and expensive: Now that every writer has a desktop computer, even the worst manuscripts are correctly formatted and neatly printed, unlike the old days, when the real stinkers were scribbled in red crayon on something that looked like paper napkins. In the mid-90s, Safeway decides to buy directly from publishers, and not to work with the rack-jobbers who stocked mesh racks displaying books in their stores. In theory, this eliminates an unproductive middleman. In practice, the rack-jobbers were the only people who knew what books would sell best in each city and state across the country. The chain bookstores follow their lead, and rack-jobbers go out of business. For the first time, most paperback sales go through actual bookshops. This gives far too much power to a new broker in the industry: the chain-store buyer. What I (DS) observed at this time was that the actual *editing* quality of supposedly first-rank books was falling. For instance, I vividly recall that the first edition of Five Hundred Years After, by Steven Brust, included a conversation where character names were reversed. At more or less the same time, my husband read a book -- he thinks maybe one of the Seafort novels -- which had *obviously* been written in first person, then changed to third person third person, then changed to first person via global search-and-replace. Whether it was completely the case by this point or not, by 2012: most books from the Big Six aren’t edited at all. Please bear in mind that acquisition editors are not line editors. Line-editing of manuscripts used to be part of their job description, but nowadays they are so vastly overworked that they simply don’t have time for it. ... In consequence, they will reject any work not by a name author unless the copy is clean, virtually error-free, and without any issues of consistency or continuity sufficient to annoy the target audience. With name authors, they sometimes just screw up. Here is a recent shameful example: Giant Mistakes in Raymond Feist Book. The editor sheepishly admitted that she was ‘not reading like an editor’ and simply did not notice that an entire chapter was mistakenly printed from an early draft and not from the finally approved manuscript. By 2003, The big-box stores are the only brick-and-mortar outlets that still buy midlist books in quantity, and Extruded is entirely at their mercy. ...All the senior editors have quit to take less stressful and better-paying jobs as rickshaw-pullers in the Himalayas, but there’s always a fresh crop of interns to replace them. Extruded no longer accepts unagented submissions, but the slush pile is bigger than ever, because agents are taking on unpublished writers — someone has to! — and then spamming every house in New York with simultaneous submissions, where unagented writers had to submit to one publisher at a time. At some point around here: Marketing, again, is mostly nonexistent from the Big Six. ... For most books, no attempt is made to market to actual consumers; it’s all about getting books into the distribution channel in quantity. Once they reach the bookshops, they are on their own. By 2010: There is a new thingy on the market called ebooks, which nobody really seems to understand. Books are books, dammit, they’re printed on paper, and how the hell do you control something that can be copied just by transmitting it over the Internet, anyway? Extruded Books, in lockstep with all the other hundreds of imprints of G.C.HG.GM.FR. GmbH and the other cartel publishers, has just seized the ebook rights of hundreds of authors who never agreed to sell any such rights in the contracts they signed. This is of course right and necessary, because as long as an ebook edition of a work is offered for sale, it can never technically go out of print; which means that the rights will never revert to the author.

...

E-book contracts from major publishers are written to protect sales of hardcopy books sold in brick-and-mortar stores. But now authors are starting to go around the Big Six entirely. One reason is money: Writers are not working for less. A writer who publishes through Kindle Direct receives 70 percent of the retail price (which he or she sets) on every ebook sold: the same percentage that Amazon pays to traditional publishers. ...Now, it so happens that all of the Big Six, and all their imprints, have adopted exactly the same royalty for ebooks: 25 percent of net, which, for most retail outlets, equals 17.5 percent of the cover price.

...

Every Big Six imprint, on every ebook, keeps 52.5 percent of the list price for itself. In exchange, it does no printing, no shipping, no marketing (remember, its marketing efforts were entirely aimed at getting books into the shops, and ebook sellers, having unlimited virtual shelf space, accept everything), no editing worth the name, no plate-making, no accepting returns for credit.

Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.

...

The question isn’t what happens to publishing — the entire category has been evacuated. The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers.

...

The original promise of the e-book was not a promise to the reader, it was a promise to the publisher: “We will design something that appears on a screen, but it will be as inconvenient as if it were a physical object.” This is the promise of the portable document format, where data goes to die, as well. Institutions will try to preserve the problem for which they are the solution. Now publishers are in the business not of overcoming scarcity but of manufacturing demand. And that means that almost all innovation in creation, consumption, distribution and use of text is coming from outside the traditional publishing industry.

Simon traces Extruded's fortunes from its early days as an imprint of publishing conglomerate Maw & Tentacle, to the present when it's a subsidiary of Greedhead Cheeseparer HackGrind GargantuMaw FifthReich GmbH, now re-branded as BixBoox. The crucial milestones along the way were:Or, as Clay Shirky so succinctly states:Shirky says this in an interview about "social reading" that doesn't mention fandom. But E.L. James shows that he should:came from fandom, and it's the perfect storm of fannish "innovation in creation, consumption, distribution and use of text":This is almost 1500 words already, so I'll stop and get Part II ready: "50 Shades of Fandom", while I finish reading the book and work on "50 Shades of Sex". Stay tuned.

note: bold in quotes was added by me.