Sure - but I'm mostly curious to learn what kinds of experiences good hackers have had in trying to get their ideas out there. The publishing industry just seems terribly archaic, and most people trying to write books are locked into it because they don't know how to _create_ stuff on web, just consume it. HN is full of people who can create web-based stuff, so I was curious to see if there were any neat experiments people had done.
a) There are about a dozen different industries flying in loose formation and termed "publishing" -- academic press is not like mass market fiction press, or newspapers, or magazines, or self-improvement books or textbooks. The web is the latest and most rapidly changing delivery vehicle but it crosses all of these lines. Beware of thinking of "the web" as a publishing sector; rather, it's a mechanism for delivering the content to the reader's eyeballs, much like offset-litho printing.
b) Today's publishing industry runs on the set of business practices that didn't cause someone [else] to go bust at some point over the past 150 years. It may look archaic and weird, but it's that way for a whole bunch of reasons that looked good at some time.
