Publishing has always been an arduous and expensive task in the world of paper publications. It cost considerable time and money to typeset and print a book in a professional manner. Even then, it is difficult to sell the book since few libraries and book stores will bother with publications from outside of the established distribution channels.

A Vignette: One of my favorite pseudo-science books is a 1968 rebuttal of Einstein's theory of special relativity, written by Lionell S. Flotte, published by the Lionell S. Flotte Publishing Company, and distributed by the Lionell S. Flotte Bookstore. I found it among a pile of books discarded by the MIT library, where Flotte had sent a complimentary copy for their collection. In this case, he did all the proper steps of self-publishing -- including even professional-looking cover and page layouts -- only to have it end up in the library's trash pile.

In the electronic world, desktop publishing tools make professional layouts an everyday task. Commercial web sites will publish your pages for as little as $10 per month. Thus, the costs associated with self-publishing are about 1% of the comparable costs for paper publications. As several critics have noted:

"On the Internet, everyone is an author, no one is an editor"

Here's a humorous view of online publishing gone wild.
A humorous view of personal publishing.