Quote:
Originally Posted by morriss003
"In all their years as gatekeepers the traditional publishers got so used to calling all the shots they lost sight of the fact that they are just middlemen. Just like the agents. Just like the retailers. They are just service providers. They don't actually *own* the product or the market." fjtorres
This is true, but I can't help noting that, since Amazon is also a middleman, a well known author might, at some point, offer up a manuscript for bid to the web company who will take the lowest cut. In the future, we might see Amazon, Google, Facebook and others having to bid for the right to be the middleman.
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I don't think that is quite the same thing. "publishing" without Amazon is quite possible and still done, Authors use Amazon or their competitors because of convenience, not because they are the only game in town.
True, one could theoretically self publish with paperbooks, but the level of investment in knowledge, and inftrastructure between self publishing a paperbook and an ebook is significantly different. And enough to make it impractical.