The interesting part of the new Google e-book operation is that it's part of their Google Editions initiative where they've been working with independent booksellers for the last two years, and these booksellers will be selling the Google e-books. So not only is this chipping away at Amazon's lead on the e-book market, but it's letting the independent booksellers be the ones to compete with them. I want both Amazon and the independents to succeed, but mostly I want the whole market to get bigger, so this is good in general, I think.
Go ahead: Tell me about how the big publishing houses are more interested in their customers than their stockholders.
What, you think Rupert Murdoch insists on reading the manuscripts under consideration at HarperCollins? As you know, book publishing has minimal growth even when it's doing well -- 2-5% a year tops. Its profits would be a failure in any other industry. So mostly the big corporations that own book publishers and their stockholders have given up on getting book publishing to be really profitable and just cry.
Be that as it may, you weren't talking about stockholders. Here are my problems with your remark:
1) People complain that big publishers don't put out quality titles, but when you ask them who they regard as quality authors, it is inevitably almost all authors who are published and often heavily promoted by big publishers. I have had endless conversations with people railing about how big publishers care only about money and put out only awful tripe like Terry Brooks, published by Del Rey, and that they like China Mieville instead -- published and heavily promoted by Del Rey.
What you're really saying is that big SFF publishers, who put out 50-200 titles a year, sometimes put out titles you don't like and don't think much of. Which, since the publishers are not just trying to sell to your tastes and interests, is to be expected. But variety does not mean that "quality" is always ignored.
2) You are trying to make the argument that "quality" novels are not profitable, that the two are usually mutually incompatible, causing big publishers to ignore that aspect of sales. There are reams and reams of evidence that this is a false assertion, including the fact that they have "quality" titles on their lists. Many much lauded authors (like China Mieville, Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman, etc.,) are quite profitable, and respected works can make money for decades in academic sales alone, which is a very important market to big publishers and their stockholders. The sales patterns for acclaimed titles is the same as it is for any kind of fiction: small group at the top of sales, larger group in the middle, really huge group on the bottom. For every lauded author you claim doesn't sell, I can come up with ten un-lauded ones that don't sell. For every non-lauded bestseller you can come up with, I can come up with a lauded bestseller. So the money or art meme is really, really out-dated and not backed up by facts.
3) You are making the assumption that big publishers know which books are going to be profitable and so pick those ones. And this is also a false assertion.
All publishers attempt reasonable guesses about what may be profitable; they certainly try to look for books that will make them money, and try to gauge what they'll do with each title in terms of how well a book is expected to do.
And then they often find that they are completely wrong, even in non-fiction where it's easier to make predictions. The book they spent a million on for an advance bombs. The book they simply put out there on the cheap becomes a major bestseller by word of mouth. Rowling's British publisher paid her a few thousand in an advance for the first Harry Potter book and told her not to quit her day job. They had no clue.
4) You're ignoring the fact that big publishers, since they have more capital that they can float from their different titles, can afford to take a
loss on fiction authors for a good bit in order to give them time to build up an audience. The usual rule of thumb for big publishers is that it will take a debuting author three books to really start bringing in money and a decent sized audience. (That's one of the reasons that publishers do two, three book contracts with authors -- it gives them income while they try to make a dent in the market with a series or various novels.) When economic times get hard, as they have the last two years, that three book trial will get cut down to one. Nonetheless, it is standard business practice for big publishers to invest in authors and let them be unprofitable for several years in the hopes of long-term gain, which is not always realized.
This is why we have the current phenomena of mid-list authors having to adopt a new pseudonym to juice up their careers. The new pseudonym fools the number crunching computers they use now, because "new" authors are expected to run at lesser sales numbers than an established mid-list author who should have built up an audience, so low numbers for a "debuting" title are okay. And this is also why bestsellers you don't like are still important because fiction is a symbiotic market. The bestsellers provide income that lets big publishers take a flyer on "smaller" books that are not expected to sell that well, and also funnel in readers, some of whom will buy some of the "smaller" books. A bestseller paid for Rowling to be acquired by her British publisher and for a bigger deal by Scholastic in the States, and in return, she has paid for countless, countless titles in YA and SFF, and brought them readers.
5) You are expressing the implication that you know what "quality" fiction is and that those who disagree with you do not. You are also implying that all the authors who are on big publishers' lists stink, so good luck promoting with them at conventions. Rather than making an actual critique of any one author's work, by slamming big publishers en masse, you are attempting to devalue the critical opinions of others about what they might find worthy and valuable in fiction. You are offering your subjective assessments as the yardstick which we should all use, because apparently, my yardstick is inadequate. (Or I'd know that big publishers only put out crap.)
And yes, I did get all that from one sentence. All publishers care about money. Some of the scummiest publishing people I've ever encountered have been from small presses who done wrong to friends of mine even though they were legitimate. Publishers frequently do bad things, or stupid things, when it comes to authors. But this supposed war between small presses and big presses that has cropped up as an idea the last two years in the wake of the Kindle and the iPad is getting really old for me.
. I use tech when I need it, but I've never really liked it. I don't like the feel of tech. I want to see a physical book on my nightstand, not an techy looking ebook. 
Big Publishers are much more interested in the latter, and just as likely to ignore the former if it means more of the latter...
