Ebooks are gaining ground in the literary marketplace, although I doubt that the  Literary gatekeepers will accept that ebooks are literature.  This blog post from the Idea Logical Company compares the burst of ebook growth to the early surge of paperback novels:  Ebooks are making me recall the history of mass-market publishing.

For writers who hope to attract readers to books they publish outside the mainstream, publishing either with indie publishers or self-publishing on ebooks, the difficulty in attracting readers is breaking through the noise — “‘Signal-to-noise ratio’ is sometimes used informally to refer to the ratio of useful information to false or irrelevant data in a conversation or exchange.”  (Wikipedia)

Gar Haywood writes about self-promotion at:  The Most Stupendous Blog Post You Will Ever Read!

For indie-published writers, the “noise” is the avalanche of published material:  books, magazines, newspapers, comic books, online texts, cereal boxes and toothpaste tubes.  The modern world is swimming in text.  Making a publishing splash on your own that anyone notices is probably equal to the chances of anyone paying attention to a stone that a (fictional and conveniently located) tourist tosses into the thundering plunge pool under Niagara Falls.  Self-promotion is a must when the writer tosses her book into the stream of books that makes up the literary Niagara Falls.