Edited sentence: Also among those forced to self-publish were Mark Twain, Zane Grey, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Bernard Shaw, Edgar Allen Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Anais Nin.Among the authors taking this route to publication was Lewis Carroll, who paid the expenses of publishing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and most of his subsequent work.In the final analysis, judging each book and each author on merit alone must be in the best interest of both author and reader.It should be noted that in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century it was common for legitimate authors, if they could afford to, to pay the costs of publishing their books.One industry analyst estimated a thousand a day.Recent estimates put books published annually between 150,000 and a quarter-million.Self-publishing was not judged negatively as it is today.Such writers could expect more control of their work, greater profits, or both.That the industry has tarred all alternative presses with the pejorative "vanity' is to be expected from an industry, whose hegemony is threatened.That they serve as arbiters of what is worth reading and what is not, has kept alternative publishing alive and thriving for centuries.The prevailing prejudice against self-published authors stems mainstream publishing and media---both of which have a vested interest in maintaining status quo.This list, which is by no means complete, should make it obvious why an alternative publishing industry exists: Publishers are poor judges of what is worthy of publication, and the fact that eight out of every ten books they publish loses money is proof.Who would not agree that, had the ‘wisdom’ of publishing at the time prevailed, our literature would be the poorer for it.With numbers like that, mainstream publishers' desperation is understandable.With the advent of Print On Demand (POD), mainstream publishing's stranglehold on access to the market of ideas is fast slipping