An article was referred to me from " Beyond the Bookcast ." It's interesting to hear (see the previous link for the podcast) what the folks from Publishers Weekly made of ALA's midwinter. On the whole, I agreed with them: things are looking up. But having thought about this some more, I think there's something really new here. The commentators "got" what we're doing with the DCL Model. The creation of our own infrastructure, our launching of direct negotiations with publishers, our securing of significant discounts, all reveal a fundamental shift in the market. Once we put together our system, and realized that the independent publishers and the self-published authors weren't available to us at any price through the usual suspects of Baker and Taylor, Ingrams, or 3M, we realized that we had cut out the middle man . And having done that, why not go direct to more mainstream publishers? After all, we were using the same technologies as the dist...