The Arthurs and The Publishers

What are the roles of the Arthur and the publisher? The author being the owner of the great idea that is going to be published is seen as the sole owner of an unpublished manuscript or a particular book. A book can not be published without his or her ideas, while the publisher is seen as the manager, developer and risk taker of the idea. Can this two only work hand in hand?
We argued in class that there is a possibility of the author doing all the publishers work and heading straight to distributions, however must only target a particular kind of audience.
In John B Thomson book Books in the digital age read that the author have to depend hugely on the publisher to create a good reading material, because Most of the jobs were done by the publisher. Important jobs such as content acquisition, content development, quality control, design, sales, marketing, warehousing and distributions are the most important aspect of the jobs.
I believe even as the word is rapidly becoming a much more global village, it is still a long way before an Arthur and the publisher can depart separate ways. It will really take time. Today, for a great and quality published job to be done need both the Author and the Publisher. An Author who is not targeting a larger audience have a choice of doing something different like creating e-publishing, blogs and online based stories, but will defiantly need a publisher if he wants a great job done. On the other hand, Publishers in this day and age, create a web page and sites looking for Authors, this shows that authors are having more choices in the way they can express their ideas and get money from it. Some still do the job on their own, going directly to the consumers and costumers while majority of them go through an online publisher to get their work notice. A lot of smaller Publishing companies are based online and are working hard to attract consumers, they give discounts invite you to download some certain works for free, etc.Only already know traditional and successful authors go to big publishers such as the Cambridge and Oxford press, this have to do mainly when they know the work is going to be successful.


References
John B Thomson (2005) Books in the Digital Age, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Whitmore Publishing Company. 2009[online] Available at http://whitmorepublishing.com/home.asp
Dorrance Publishing Co; Inc.2009. [online] ( updated 26 March 2009) Available at http://www.dorrancepublishing.com/info.asp?program=internetworldsearch&layout