That this initially got a positive reaction from the writers of Smart Bitches and Dear Author. Those girls are normally pretty savvy about these things.
Yeah, but they're readers, not writers (of fiction, I mean; non-fiction has different issues, and is an area where everyone agrees that self-publishing CAN, in the right circumstances, work well).
They haven't had to hold the hand of a crying friend who just realized that they'd spent every penny they had (and quite a few they didn't) to vanity-publish a book that would never, ever sell to anyone outside their family, and that the person who'd raved about how good her book was, was actually raving about how good her money was, and everyone else was laughing at her or feeling condescending to her or thinking she was an idiot, or just plain hurting for her. Nor have they read through the substantial portion of agent/editor slush that's just plain illiterate, so as to get an idea of how the typical vanity-pubbed book will read. They're thinking of the .1% dross, and not the 99.9% okay-to-unreadable remainder.
Publishing is a difficult business, with lots of traps for the unwary, that readers don't know about or think about, because they're not at risk for them. Readers want more good books on the market, and from that point of view (given the complaint, largely unfounded I believe, but commonly heard, that editors/agents filter out good but unusual books), the idea that a company can get more of those good but unusual books into the readers' hands has to sound good. It's not that simple, of course, but there is a germ of something appealing to it. For a reader, I mean.
JD