Trends in academic publication
The academic publishing world has become increasingly dominated by the need for cost retrieval through publishing books that sell well. This comes from squeezes in university budgets, changes in tax laws, and the spiraling costs of periodicals, which force libraries to cut their book acquisition funds.
The low-circulation scholarly monograph or festschrift anthology has become an endangered species. Some are still published, but, as one editor said to me, "we had a retreat where it was made clear that each individual editor must have a mixed list of works that include some high circulation items." It was no longer enough for the press as a whole to have that mix; it had to reach into individual fields. This is difficult to achieve in many specialized areas.
It seems inevitable in this situation that self-publication will increase.
For instance, my plan, if the book is not accepted by the current publisher, or if they have copyright objections to the hypertext, is to post the book manuscript in pdf, available for download to complement the hypertext. But what would that do to the experience of reading the hypertext? I suspect that with book in hand the same pressures I felt as author will be felt by the reader, and the expository sections of the hypertext will be ignored in favor of the narratives. (On the other hand, some comments from a reader question that expectation.)