Brad DeLong bangs his head against the wall:

When book-fetishization, entrenched prejudices, and administrative neuroses run up against budgets, they will fall. Have every university press "publish" books that it doesn't believe will sell 2000 copies by putting .pdf files up on their respective webservers.

If all university presses did this tomorrow, the crisis in scholarly publishing would be solved--as would the difficulty assistant professors have in finding publishers.

We can move from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom tomorrow, if we will just open our eyes and abandon our false consciousness. The High Energy Theory subfield of physics moved from journal articles to webservers as their principal locus of intellectual activity back in 1995. It's been nearly a decade since then. Why have the rest of us not followed them?