A couple of interesting articles:
One at Book View Cafe, again trying to explain how fiction publishing is symbiotic and non-fiction publishing is semi-symbiotic, and how authors — even celebrity authors you hate — help fund one another.
http://blog.bookviewcafe.com/2010/06/14/writing-nowadays-celebrity-who-you-know/
And blogging literary agent Nathan Bransford tries to explain that looking for new authors is just a small part of what agents do and that keeping authors out of the marketplace is not an agent’s job at all.
http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2010/06/agents-are-not-just-gatekeepers.html