Books and the selling thereof

truepenny had an interesting post and comment threads going on about series and the way they're handled in book publishing, and the refusal of some marketing departments to label books as series, especially when in the fantasy genre, series are pretty much de rigeur and par for the course.

I started asking some questions of casacarona in this thread here concerning why some of those things were. Because obviously, the business and science of selling books is something I am deeply interested in.

I was really set to thinking by this response (bolding hers, not mine):

But the thing you have to understand is that a publisher's customer is not the individual book buyer/reader. A publisher's customer is a book wholesaler, or a large chain buyer, or a library buying service, or an independent bookstore. Publishers don't sell books to readers. Bookstores do that. So we have to listen to what our customers tell us about what they want. They're the ones who are buying.

( In which I ponder about books and how they get off the shelves and whether there is a better business model for it )