And too bad for the authors and customers as well. You will lose out on the voice of authors who wish to write but can't be arsed with the details or risk of bringing their manuscript to market.

I believe the term your looking for is oligopoly. You have the choice of a monopoly of the retailer or a oligopoly of the big 5 publishers. I would argue the oligopoly is preferable to the monopoly due to barrier of entry. There are hundreds if not thousands of smaller publishers that might not rival the oligopoly in terms of size but we can remain profitable and every once and a while hit it big with a best seller. Amazon is already entrenched as a practical monopoly and I just don't see how any sort of small upstart is going to overcome that. Small publishers can and do exist in the existing oligopoly but small retail outlets will not with Amazon's ability to dump product.

I work for a publisher; it's not Apple's profit margin that we're worried about. It's the hundreds of other smaller retail customers that provide diversity to our customer base. Amazon has, can, and will dump products and that is detrimental to our smaller customers who do not have other revenue streams. If you think retailers are doing just fine I would point you to Borders who, nearly right up to the point they failed, were one of our largest customers. You can make an argument that this is simply how it should be and that's fine but as a publisher we would like to see a diverse range of sellers rather than just Amazon and a bit of Apple on the side.

Monopoly ... mono ... kind of indicates the singular so I don't see how multiple publishers can have a singular monopoly. Certainly, the big 5 can be dickish but there are hundreds if not thousands of smaller publishers out there; I work for one. I would consider dumping product as an abuse of a monopoly and Amazon had done just that with our books in the past and there's no reason they won't do so in the future to further cement their monopoly in online physical book sales and e-books via the Kindle.

I work for a publisher and I can attest that Amazon has indeed sold our books below what they pay us. Amazon can most certainly afford it and they only need to do so long as competitors exist. Book retailers are already struggling so it wouldn't take too long to knock out all but those that have other sources of revenue.

I work for a publishing company and ... this is going to blow your mind ... a significant majority of our authors wouldn't want to have to be responsible for editing, promoting, designing, and selling their product. They also tend to really like that we give them money in advance before they even have a finished manuscript. Their book could sell zero copies but they at least got several grand out of the deal; it's a comforting thought when putting in months of effort. Are there examples of authors out there who do like to take the hands on approach and can it work out for them? Sure. I seriously doubt however that our 60+ year old Amish fiction author wants to try and figure out why InDesign hyphenates across a page break despite being told not to when you add a hyperlink text destination for the table of content.

Why do publishers care about this? I work for a publisher and Amazon has rapidly become our largest customer and is essentially a monopoly in online sales of physical books as well as e-books via the Kindle. Amazon is able to price their products below cost because they have other revenue streams to make up for it; our other customers do not. We would like to see our other customers survive and maintain some diversity in our customer base. If Amazon is allowed to dump their products that will certainly lead to furthering their monopoly. Are there laws and protections regarding dumping? Sure ... but I doubt they would be timely enough to help our already struggling retailers. You can certainly ridicule this as an outdated business model but the publisher's perspective is clear: if you allow Amazon to price their competition out of business via dumping they will, it will work, and the publishing ecosystem will suffer.

>it's with the middle men who take the majority of the profits And the majority of the risk. Publishers put up the author's advance and invest the time and money to bring the book to market before seeing a single dime. If the books is a flop, and a majority of books are flops, the author keeps their advance and the publisher just eats it. The retailers, in most cases, can return the books for a full refund and often enough refuse to pay the publisher.

As mentioned above, it's speculation that drives the markets. That is to say, people try to gamble on the price of oil going up or down. So the actual production levels at the current date are not the entire story. The number of permits for new drilling has supposedly plummeted in recent months. If permits aren't being given now then in the future production is going to go down and prices will go up. Due to speculation ... the prices will go up now for the perceived drop in future supply. To be clear, I'm not entirely convinced this is the only factor involved or even that it has some significant impact on the price of gasoline. It does however suggest why the amount of current production isn't correlated to current gas prices. They're not, they're tied to what people think future production will be.

I work for a small publisher. I don't particularly agree with our pricing scheme nor DRM but that's not my department. If you want your books on the millions of Kindles out there then you had better have it available via Amazon. It's a simple as that. We will sell our books to practically any retailer and we have a growing number that sell ebooks. In terms of Amazon using their monopoly ... they already had one with physical books and all the arm twisting and discounts stuff applies equally there.

Disclaimer: I work for a book publisher. The author takes nearly zero percent of the financial risks. Contracts vary of course but it is typical for an author to receive an advance on signing the contract and on delivering the manuscript. These are advances against the royalty the book is expected to earn but unless there is a breach of contract that advance is not returned to the publisher. The publisher then puts all the money up front to edit, design, print, and distribute the book to retailers. If the book does not sell then the publisher gives the retailer a full refund and eats the whole thing as a loss. E-books are great because they take out the costs associated with printing the books and dealing with returns but they still eat the costs when a book flops ... and most books flop. So yes, self publishing is a great option for those authors who are willing to invest the time to write a book, the money to hire professional editors and designers, and the risk that they won't make a dime. Oh, and they have to figure out how to market it, convert it into an e-book, and deal with all the sales bullshit. This might be crazy talk but most authors are dedicated people who love to write books. Few desire to spend the time and energy on the business side of things to produce, market, and sell those books.

I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for that shakeup. I work for a publisher and we, like many, generally welcome the transition to e-books. Not having to print, stock, ship, and process returns for physical books is a dream. However, the actual printing is a very small portion of what we do. Finding good authors/material in the sea of crap that gets submitted is a job unto itself. Taking the manuscript and properly editing and designing it is not small task either; you'd be surprised how many full-time authors would fail a grammar test. Dealing with hundreds of retailers isn't what most authors want to be in the business of doing. Getting those retailers to shell out thousands in advanced royalties isn't all that likely. Publishers take all of the financial risks in publishing; if a book doesn't sell the retailers who "bought" them can return them for a full refund no matter what the condition of the books (they love stickers). That is petty much THE reason you pay $15 for a paperback; consumers end up paying for all the books that didn't sell.

There's plenty of examples out there of technology that has rapid growth in the first years and then levels off with slow growth. The existence of a plateau is the suspicion but at the end of the day the goal is to make as many e-books available as possible. Every new title we release has an e-book now so if tomorrow e-book sales jumped to 50% that would be fine with us.

Print on demand has become much cheaper these days and we actually do a lot of it already albeit internally. Rather than just put a book out of print we'll call it out of stock indefinitely but if a store wants it we'll print it as a short run via a POD system. However it is still limited in terms of print quality and cover, paper, and binding options. For novels this isn't a huge barrier but non-fiction, specifically expensive Academic books, would be a tough sell without a nice cloth binding. So until POD has true parity with what we can get from an actual press it won't fully supplant how it's done now.

I would agree, it does sound a lot like the music industry although despite their own best efforts to destroy themselves they're still around. I would guess that it's easier to make a book than music but it's much harder to do it well. There's no formula you can run a manuscript through to determine if it's good or not. We're trying to not make any rash decisions and move at the right pace, not too fast and not too slow. I'm making an assumption here, so I apologize if I'm wrong, but it doesn't sound like you've worked with authors a whole lot. If your only interaction is via blogs then you're getting a very skewed impression. While a few will certainly jump ship, the vast majority of them have no interest. Remember, they sought us out, not the reverse. Self publishing isn't a new idea and this isn't the first piece of technology that's come along that 'threatened' the publishing industry. Each time there were a few successes and a much larger number of abject failures. Ever since the personal computer came into being we've been called the buggy whip industry. Again, to clarify, everyone sees the writing on the wall and nobody in their right mind is saying no to e-books. However, no one is making any rash moves.