In the last year it seems everyone and their brother is into self-publishing. Sure, it started with Lulu.com cornering the market, but Amazon got in on the game, Harlequin has their venture, and it seems every month or three there's some new endeavor out there. With so many self-publishing options it seems like a new age of print material, both electronic and physical.
I'm all for self-publishing; indeed, I am self-published. However I can't say it's exactly new. We've had self-publishing for years, we've had unrestricted access to eyeballs for any author for well over a decade.
We called it the World Wide Web.