Self-publishing, in various forms, has been around as long as publishers have had books to print. But with the merging of small “mom and pop” publishers and big-name book publishers such as Random House, HarperCollins, and Hachette from the late 1800s to the 1920s, books published outside of traditional venues carried a growing stigma.

The assumption? If a book is rejected by one of these publishing houses, it isn’t good enough to be published, period.

However, this wasn’t always the case. Richard Loomis, co-founder of Sumner & Stillman, an antiquarian bookselling business, mentions a rather famous self-publisher: Mark Twain.

Frustrated with his treatment by traditional publishing houses, Twain decided not to bother with them anymore. “Many of his novels were published by firms that were really just him – and sold primarily by subscription, in a variety of binding styles at different prices; even today, one sees sales samples of his books with some frequency.”

However, the Internet is slowly changing the way self-publishing is perceived, just as it has changed our perceptions about so many things. In contrast with the increasingly exclusive publishing houses, web-based, self-, or e-publishing businesses offer new authors the chance to see their writing in print. For struggling writers who were told there was no market for their book or who haven’t been able to land an agent, companies such as Self Publishing, Inc., iUniverse, and Lulu offer freedom and opportunity in a suffering industry.

Articles in both Wired and The New York Times explore a small but growing phenomenon: some authors land a book deal with a publishing house after a self-published work has met extraordinary success. A ray of hope? Maybe not.

Although novels such as Christopher Paolini’s Eragon and William Young’s The Shack have blazed a trail from self-published insignificance to a spot on The New York Times bestseller lists, that path is still pretty lonely. Paolini and Young remain the exception rather than the rule.

The current economic downturn, which has hit traditional publishing companies hard, may be a saving grace for self-publishing businesses. Companies like Random House have to shell out thousands, sometimes millions of dollars in advances, production, and marketing costs in return for a decreasing return from a reading public that moves further and further away from print media.

Self-publishing businesses, on the other hand, rely on authors to shoulder much of the cost of editing, designing, and marketing, often offering those services, but for a pretty hefty price. Yet, for authors who just want their writing to have greater visibility, those are small costs to pay in return for a sure thing. Submitting a manuscript to an agent is a target that is increasingly difficult to hit.

Newest on the scene are the e-publishers. Doing away with physical books, works published by companies such as Wattpad and Smashwords are free to submit and either free or very cheap to read. However, writing published on these sites often suffers from the same poor public image as self-published printed works. When your entire ideology is founded on the egalitarian premise that everyone can be published, quality control becomes a bit of an issue.

Unique among e-publishing companies, WEbook.com attempts to resolve the problem of quality by promoting collaborative writing and intensive peer editing. A number of forums allow a community of writers to work together, request feedback, and even recruit contributors for their work. If a writer decides they would like to put their work forward to be considered for publication, and it gets enough votes from the rest of the online community, that writer has the opportunity to be chosen by WEbook as one of a select few works to be published in traditional print form.

WEbook serves as a bridge between print and digital publishing. Where many companies are either trying to strengthen the allure of print books and others are turning to fully embrace the e-book market, WEbook embodies a middle ground in which all that really matters is a good story.

“I think there’s room for both online and traditionally published literature,” said Katie Krum, marketing manager at WEbook. “In the end, we’re all trying to produce great books, whether they’re e-books or traditionally printed. There is certainly a lot of momentum on the e-book front right now, but I don’t see the printed book disappearing anytime soon. The important thing is to serve readers, which means offering them great literature in whatever form they want it. Where I think a company like WEbook has an advantage is with aspiring writers.”

It is free to publish any kind of work, from poems to self-help books to novels, on WEbook. An advantage which WEbook holds over its print-bound competitors is its international scope. Where publishing houses are constrained by the buying and selling of foreign rights, an Internet-based company such as WEbook has no such restraints.

Said Krum, “Anyone can put their project on the site. At present, there are more than 300 foreign language projects on WEbook, including those in Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese, Serbian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Arabic. We’re launching our first ‘local’ site with a foreign language publisher in just a few weeks. In the near term, WEbook U.S. will be publishing for the American market first and foremost, which means books in English only, but we’ll certainly pursue foreign rights sales if a book performs well in the U.S. That’s just smart publishing.”

Traditionally, one of the biggest advantages of being published by one of the big print houses was the marketing resources they have at their disposal. However, Krum explained that WEbook isn’t afraid to rely on the Internet for marketing as well as for its basic publishing platform.

“WEbook puts together a traditional marketing plan for each book as well as some creative out-of-the-box initiatives. For a YA novel we published in June, The Legend of Vinny Whiskers, by Gregory Kemp, while we did some outreach to traditional media, we focused on gathering reviews from bloggers in three specific target markets – tweens, moms and librarians/teachers. We also did several book giveaways with social books sites (Goodreads.com, LibraryThing.com, etc.) to raise awareness on those sites.”

Companies like WEbook represent the efforts of individuals who recognize that what is most important is the story. Whether or not the public’s perception of self-publishing and e-books will change in the coming years – only time will tell.