Kevin Carson has an excellent review of Cory Doctorow's new near-scifi book: Makers. I'm ordering it right now. Will pen a review when able.
Here's a snippet from the review re: the rise of small/individual scale manufacturing (makers in aggregate). It's a process similar to what we have seen re: publishing.
The individual startups, given sufficient agility to switch rapidly to new products as returns collapsed on the old ones, could produce enormous ROI compared to traditional industrial investment. The problem is that, despite the astronomical rate of return, the absolute quantities of capital required for such startups was so small; even a million garage shops, if they require only a few grand to get started, will use only a fraction of the capital that used to be invested in conventional industry. So the overwhelming majority of available capital still sat idle without any productive outlet. What’s more, those enormous ROIs were as unstable as a uranium atom; the problem was that with the initial capital outlays required so small, and entry barriers so low, the period of entrepreneurial rents from being first to market kept getting shorter and shorter, until the investors were barely staying ahead of the shock wave of competitive price implosion.