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I read the rant linked in one of the replies, and my personal opinion is that Ms. Le Guin, for all her history of working within it, doesn't understand the publishing industry and better than I do. While Amazon certainly influences the best seller lists, it doesn't control them. If the publishers are actually dropping books from being in print because of "marginal sales", it's probably a combination of the tax laws (which changed in the 80s to consider unsold books taxable inventory) and pressure on the publishers to have higher margins (which generally means concentrate on the big print run best sellers, and move on to the next one, and hype, hype, hype). Two of those Big Publishing Houses (or maybe 1.5, since the Random Penguin is only about 50% owned by Bertelsmann) are actually private German companies, so it's not clear exactly what their margin pressures are. In general, I think when an industry merges into market oligarchy, especially with a lot of leveraged debt, there's no choice but to seek higher margins because of the debt. And it doesn't help that between incompetently run bookstores chains, publishers using anti-piracy measures that guaranteed Amazon's ebook dominance, we now basically have a market oligarchy with a monopsony (single dominant buyer). I don't see this is going to change any time soon unless the publishers force Amazon to switch to a platform neutral ebook format and the publishers start supporting bookstores by giving them discounts comparable to what Amazon and the chains get.
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