What have the Publishers ever done for us? And do we need them?

... "Tim Gowers has used Spike Milligan as an inspiration for challenging Elsevier: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/ . British satire is one of the things that keeps us going... Mike Taylor is a dinosaur expert who has got so angry with the publishing industry that he not only blogs about it but wrote an article in the Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/16/academic-publishers-enemies-science where he asserted that ‘Academic publishers have become the enemies of science’. I agree with this phrase... There has been a reply from Graham Taylor – director of academic, educational and professional publishing at the UK Publishers Association http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/27/academic-publishers-enemies-science-wrong . It makes the case for why the publishing industry creates value. Some of it is reaction to MikeT’s article, but in a few places it attempts to show why the publishing industry is essential and justifies the 10 billion USD it takes in every year. I have extracted the paragraphs that bear on this:... My analysis. ‘publishers are trying as hard as possible to create Open Access’. This is simply false... ‘we’re publishing more each year so we’re putting our charges up’... But in digital industries we see costs plummeting every year. We expect disks, bandwidth, cpu, to get massively cheaper each year. And the software that creates digital objects improves. So any INNOVATIVE industry would be reducing its costs... Petitions can grow very quickly in the Internet age. And that’s what Tim Gowers and Tyler Neylon have started http://thecostofknowledge.com/. ‘If you would like to declare publicly that you will not support any Elsevier journal unless they radically change how they operate, then you can do so by filling in your details in the box below....’"