Earlier quoted context omitted.
The major thing publishers facilitated beyond simple distribution was organizing and vetting peer review. I appreciate that they have to make ends meet and that they are contributing something valuable, but it is at a point that the exorbitant price they charge people to read my work makes it basically inaccessible to many people, defeating the point of publishing it in the first place. And lets not even talk about p…
Yes, it has become less useful. I also read that they only server as a distributor, and that the review process was scaled down, or is nothing from their end. It really is a shame, since most of the research I do is for self-teaching, and sometimes whimsical, so I would never pay to start with. However, I have gone on from the whimsical to the serious, because I did read a free paper.
It used to be that they put a lot more effort into editing and typesetting for print, but they don't do nearly as much nowadays. You just send them your TeX file and if something is wrong they tell you to fix it.