The publishing industry, once (0) NOTORIOUSLY difficult to break into, has been reshaped in the last two decades by digital platforms that allow anyone to a book into the world without so much as a rejection letter. Self-publishing, once as a refuge for the unreadable, has shed much of its stigma; a handful of its practitioners now out-earn mid-list authors at legacy houses. Yet the revolution has come its own difficulties. For every writer who finds an audience, thousands publish into a silent void, their work all but invisible in a marketplace of millions of titles. Critics argue that the absence of editorial has flooded readers with poorly crafted prose, while defenders reply that gatekeeping was never quite the guarantor of quality that its nostalgists What seems beyond dispute is that the definition of authorship has widened. Whether that widening has enriched literary culture or merely diluted it is a question that may a definitive answer for some time yet.