via Nolan Bushnell could easily have gone with a Big 6 publisher, but he preferred to self-publish. Here’s why:

But when he tried to find an outlet for the book, How to Find the Next Steve Jobs, Bushnell got frustrated with the traditional publishing houses. It would take up to four years to edit it and publish it, they said. “I don’t have that kind of time,” replied Bushnell, now 70. He also didn’t accept that publishers should keep 80% or more of the book’s sales, as is traditional.

So Bushnell turned to Net Minds, a brand new publishing platform that officially launched Wednesday. Net Minds is the brainchild of Tim Sanders, a former Yahoo executive and the New York Times bestselling author of Love is the Killer App. It will publish regular books as well as e-books, and lets authors build a team to edit, design and market the book in exchange for a cut of the sales.

Sanders’ founding principle: books should be run like startups. “The industry is incredibly inefficient at every level,” he tells Mashable. “Frankly, for a lot of authors, it’s incredibly unfair. Advances are dropping. And there’s no reason why it should take three years to publish.”