Traditional Publishing Sucks
There are too many books, magazines and newspapers published every day. We haven't got a chance of reading even a fraction of them. And publishers! What do they know? They never find the really good stuff, do they? There must be an alternative.
The alternative is 30,000 times worse. According to a 2000 study by the University of California, Berkeley, printed content represents 0.003 percent of all content published annually in the world. The vast majority of content is published on computers. For every book printed there are some 30,000 "books" published on computers.
Traditional publishers may be bad at publishing content, but modern organizations are woeful. The Web is supposed to be the greatest library in the world. Much of it is more like a giant, oozing information dump. Put simply, most organizations have no real concept of the value of content. They are more concerned about storing it than publishing it.