J.A. Konrath put up a blog entry, A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing. This mostly sums up my feelings on publishing versus e-publishing, but I think these opinions carry more weight when they’re coming from someone who has experience actually dealing with publishers. His article is rather lengthy, so you should go read that first. My shorter thoughts come after the cut.
E-publishing and POD publishing both present the seeming opportunity to level the playing field by allowing for unlimited shelves. In this way, one does not need to worry about a book expiring or being remaindered, because no stock is produced until it is ordered.
However, e-vending suffers from some limitations. Browsing by categories or by keywords on an e-vendor makes it much harder to stumble onto new writers or new genres. This is typical when one walks through a live bookstore, and that experience still cannot be duplicated online. The live store has another advantage in that during the walk to pick up the book they want, a customer may stumble across multiple titles that they might not have otherwise bought. So the store creates new sales leads for writers that an e-store can’t duplicate.
The only way to beat the system is not through optimized keywords or better market niche creation. The real secret is in establishing our names with readers. When readers Google a keyword like vampires, the odds that they will find my vampire books are slim. But if they search for my name, they find my web site, my blogs, and places to buy my books. They find reviews for my books (most of which are positive), and they find social sites and other ways to contact me. By looking for my name, they eliminate all of my competition. So it behooves me to get people to mention me and my stories in a positive light.
Finding willing reviewers is still hard, but I think their reluctance is caused by the lack of a decent e-reader for under $100. Reading from a screen is hard on a lot of people, but a decent e-ink screen could change a lot of minds if they were cheaper.
The second factor is the limited support coming from the major publishers. Imagine DVD making a standard for the disc, but most of the movie manufacturers refused to make movies in the format. This is what e-books are like right now.
We need publishers to embrace open standard e-book formats, and we need cheaper e-reading devices to entice the reviewers to take on electronic files. In other words, what we need is for this market to grow up and get with the program.
I am a bisexual transsexual with bigender tendencies, a former resident of Texas, but now live in Milan with my husband. I used to write in a variety of genres and published my work through 
Mari Concurs.
Thank you.
We live in different paradigms. I would not buy an e-book because I collect books. I plan to pass them down to my children and so on. I have books over 200 years old. My first apple IIe can not read any of the original disks because they are too old and lost the data. Kindle is but one year old and already has a new model and it has problems of cracking plastic.
I read non fiction and find new books mainly from reference of authors in the books I have already read. Also from research on subjects. Sometimes from book reviews in publications like Atlantic Monthly.
It is a rare event that I would just buy a book from a book store without doing prior research on the author.