I worry about Amazon because they're the #1 retailer of books in the world. They're so powerful they can push around traditional publishers on issues of price and those publishers are huge companies backed by other huge companies. Anyone with a reasonable working knowledge of antitrust laws couldn't argue that they aren't abusing their market share in monopolistic ways. This self publishing trend is nice but it produces abject shit for the most part. Publishers take incredible risks on books that go nowhere. Go to Goodwill or the remainder pile in Barnes and Noble to see how much money is spent on books no one reads. Traditional publishing wants to sell your book more than the record companies want to sign your band, your book just sucks. No one, not even publishers, get into the book business to get rich but Amazon by virtue of its market share can make publishing much worse if it ends up assuming end to end control of publishing which seems to be within their goals as a company.
Fair enough. But the phenominal thing about monopolies and large companies is that they are very difficult to keep in the position of market leaders. They eventually get out innovated by the market. Even when Microsoft was at its worst and either buying or crushing everything that opposed it in the 90s a company came back and beat them. I mean now Apples is getting pantsed, but beside the point. The problem isn't that there is something wrong with publishers putting money out marketing and printing books. But with digital distribution, the issue at stake here, what is the problem with a funding model that rewards better click rates? Isn't that the application of the internet funding model on books. We're all okay with bloggers getting paid that way, newspaper and magazine writers getting paid that way, but we've got a problem with self-published novelists? I know Amazon won't last because the strategy is flawed.