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Originally Posted by alex_d
BREAK UP THE HUGE PUBLISHERS INTO SMALL COMPANIES.
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I would argue that this is happening already.
I'll point to Scott Siegler's recent Ancestor book release. No big publisher would take it, so he went to a smaller press. Now, the demand basically buried that small press, but think that the small press likes that kind of problem.
With eBooks, publishers become irrelevant. They exist today because they make it economic for the average person to purchase a book. The costs of creating and distributing an eBook are effectively $0, so for eBooks they are no longer needed.
Effectively, the author becomes his own publisher when it comes to eBooks.
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Originally Posted by alex_d
The solution, however, is straightforward. Force competition manually. (And simply braking up large companies is one strategy.)
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As we've seen with the movie industry, economic forces will make this happen without the need for the gov't to step in (in the case of the movie industry, by the time the gov't got involved, the film cartel created by Edison was effectively broken).
What needs to happen is for the gov't to get its nose OUT. They need to stop passing laws that promote the status quo (like the DMCA and extensions to Copyright length). Competition can only exist when it's not locked down by stupid laws.