The problems are structural in the industry, but they're not an accident: they're a result of the way the (current) industry emerged. Publishing is a very old business—it's been around in some shape or another for over 500 years, and in much its current shape since the mid-Victorian period—and the way publishers do business is the intersection of the set of all business practices that did not cause one of their antecedents to go bust, over a roughly 250 year period.And now to the current mess.