It's very clear to me that Amazon is doing it far better than anyone else as far as both books and ebooks are concerned. Strong evidence of this is to be found in agency pricing which is essentially a response to Amazon's success. Amazon alone are not going to kill existing publishers, but a failure by those publishers to adapt to the new business conditions and technology may well do so. They must adapt or perish.
I think the new business model which emerges may well be much better for authors. I quite often see authors lamenting the piracy of their books, and I certainly have some sympathy on that score. However, Piracy is a convenient scapegoat, a handy reason to point to why authors are not making money. Publishers love to make high estimates of the number of books pirated and then calculate revenue lost on the assumption that every one was in lieu of a retail purchase. It is probably impossible to know what the true figure is, though I suspect that the actual number of sales lost is quite small, especially amongst less well known authors and books. Some people boast of libraries of thousands of ebooks, few of which have or will ever be read. It is sheer fantasy to suggest that these people would pay to purchase each of these books. And of course, for each book not sold it is the publisher, not the author, who is usually the loser. In fact, logic would suggest that for most of the 70% of published books where the advance is not "earned out" (ie; royalties on books sold are sufficient to pay back the advance), the author loses nothing. Only in those cases where lost sales would have brought total sales over that required to earn out any advance could the author be said to have borne the piracy loss. I am not suggesting that it is morally or legally right or okay for the publisher to bear this loss. However, I must confess to having little sympathy for many of them given the business practices adopted over the years.
It should also be noted that only a tiny percentage of those writing can even make a decent living at it, and only a miniscule number become wealthy. It is an industry based on hope, the hope that you may be the next J.K. Rowling or Stephen King, or perhaps even the more modest hope that you can at least make a decent living out of what you love to do. My admittedly brief research seems to indicate that the trend is to offer ebook authors a much higher royalty than was standard. Amazon, for instance, offers 35% and in some cases 70% royalties to those participating in their Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Program (see
https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishi...-1_participate). Lulu is another interesting example. One can only speculate what may happen as more big name authors come off contract, and new "indie" authors become popular and are sought out by the large publishers.
I think there is reason to at least hope that the future may leave room for many more authors to make a reasonable living from their writing, at the expense mainly of "publishers" fulfilling a different and narrower role in return for a much lesser slice of the pie. Other interesting links bearing on this are:
http://www.brandewyne.com/writingtips/authorspaid.html
http://darkerotica.blogspot.com.au/2...27f02b8cea3b12
http://brendacoulter.blogspot.com.au...why-write.html