“When their former dictator, Augusto Pinochet, died four years ago, thousands of Chileans poured into the streets to celebrate — but that’s small potatoes compared to the crowds lining up to dance on the grave of traditional book publishing,” observes Laura Miller in a recent column for Salon. “The industry, we’re forever being told, is antiquated and hidebound; it doesn’t know how to spot great books or how to deliver them to readers. Fortunately, a tsunami of sparkling new technology is just about to hit those old fogies, washing them from the face of the earth so that the people who know what they’re doing can finally take over.” When that time comes, she notes, editors and agents and publishers are screwed, and “how gloriously liberating it will be for authors.”

In short, “The reign of the detested gatekeepers has ended!”

However, notes, Miller, “How readers feel about all this usually gets lost in the fanfare and the hand-wringing. People who claim that there are readers slavering to get their hands on previously rejected books always seem to have a previously rejected book to peddle ….” Given still more books to choose from “they’re more likely to ask for help in narrowing down their choices.”

So the real question is: “What happens once the self-publishing revolution really gets going, when all of those previously rejected manuscripts hit the marketplace, en masse, in print and e-book form, swelling the ranks of 99-cent Kindle and iBook offerings by the millions? Is the public prepared to meet the slush pile?”

And as for slush piles — well ….

You’ve either experienced slush or you haven’t, and the difference is not trivial. People who have never had the job of reading through the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts sent to anyone even remotely connected with publishing typically have no inkling of two awful facts: 1) just how much slush is out there, and 2) how really, really, really, really terrible the vast majority of it is. Civilians who kvetch about the bad writing of Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer or any other hugely popular but critically disdained novelist can talk as much trash as they want about the supposedly low standards of traditional publishing. They haven’t seen the vast majority of what didn’t get published — and believe me, if you have, it’s enough to make your blood run cold, thinking about that stuff being introduced into the general population.

… In other words, it’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it, and if the prophecies of a post-publishing world come true, it looks, gentle readers, as if that dirty job will soon be yours.

Yes, says Miller, “this possible future doesn’t eliminate gatekeepers: It just sets up new ones, equally human and no doubt equally flawed. How long before the authors neglected by the new breed of tastemaker begin to accuse them of being out-of-touch, biased dinosaurs?”