Amazon's model isn't much better. They make their money by setting the price for a best-seller high, and everything else ridiculously low. And this seems reasonable to a "supply and demand" society, but there's an endless supply of ebooks. More over, that means that authors aren't going to make enough money to keep writing unless they happen to have a best-seller - and the market ends up flooded with garbage like Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey. It's a CostCo mentality. The consumer doesn't know any better, and hey, they're getting most of their books for 99 cents! Seems great from their perspective. But that model kills publishing in general. Anyone who thinks the only cost to publishing a book is the time it takes to write it, has never published a book. Even for a bare-bones self-published ebook, you need at the very least an editor. For anything serious, or that crosses over into the print world, then you need a cover artist, a designer, marketing, and probably someone who knows how to bring it all together... they call those people publishers.
Have you seen the absolute garbage that gets "self published" on Amazon? The ability to put a book out there on Amazon's site *for free*, is perhaps the biggest danger to the publishing industry ever. There are thousands upon thousands of "books" that are nothing more than $.99 scams. Some are literally garbage text or word for word rip off's of someone else's work with a new title. They might only get a few suckers, but they do this *thousands* of times over.