[leebase]

Right now Amazon is clearly the 900lb gorilla in book selling. Amazon has taken it's huge influence in selling books to launch the latest and finally effective ebook market. With their $9.99 subsidized pricing of ebooks, they were able to create and dominate the ebook market. The publishers, worried to see so much power concentrated in only one of their distributors, and seeing their pricing power for books being eroded....stepped in and took pricing control away from Amazon. Still...Amazon has already established near 80% control of the ebook market (or so we hear).

But consider what is going to happen when ebooks become the majority of book selling. 5 years, ten years out at the most and the vast majority of money made in publishing will be made selling ebooks. There is nothing on the horizon to suggest that Amazon's hold on the ebook market is going to be shaken.

Or is there?

Once physical books take enough of a back seat to ebooks....when the lionshare of profits come from ebooks...then what incentive will the big six publishers have to continue selling through Amazon? Overnight they could cease working with Amazon and open their own, combined, ebook website. They won't have to worry about losing sales as anyone who wants to buy books can be directly accommodated by them via their own website. They could disintermediate Amazon the way that Amazon has disintermediated the local book store.

The publishers need a good many stores and distributors for selling their physical books. They don't need anybody to sell ebooks. They haven't been thrilled with ebooks because Amazon used predatory pricing to establish the ebook market at the expense of publisher hardback revenue. But once that transition is over, once the "big money" is no longer via the sales of physical books at all -- then the publishers will have no fear of dumping Amazon and going direct to the customer themselves.

Lee