When it comes to book publishing, isn't it Hachette that is the Giant monopoly?
If you want to buy a book they publish, you are a click away from bying it from http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ or from Apple if you want it on your ipad.
But if Amazon wants to sell it they have no choice but to get it from the conglomerate Hachette.
“The real monopoly, once you start examining business practices and attitudes, is Big Publishing itself,”
"Where is the outcry for Amazon-published authors who are blocked from sale by practically every brick and mortar store? It doesn't exist. The response is simply: That's what those authors get for signing with Amazon. Imagine an observer today saying, "That's what those authors get for signing with Hachette." The hypocrisy astounds."
If you ask, "cui bono?", the decision on who to side with is pretty obvious, at least for the average consumer.
Amazon has for decades been one of the most pro-consumer companies out there. The publishers have been slapped in court for trying to collude to raise prices. In fact, the whole source of this dispute is that Hachette wants the option to charge more for its books on Amazon.
So on the one hand, we have a company that wants us to pay more for the same product. And on the other hand we have a company that, while large in the ecosystem, is by no means a monopoly (maybe it is a monopsony, but even that is someone questionable considering they only have a 65% share of the market), and wants to charge us less. You can always buy the publishers' books from a different store if Amazon won't sell them. Well, if it weren't for the DRM the publishers originally insisted on, you could.
> (maybe it is a monopsony, but even that is someone questionable considering they only have a 65% share of the market)
65% of distribution volume is more than enough to practice monopolistic practices, especially if the industry is hurting.
I'm not necessarily against traditional publishers disappearing, but it would be nice to have a more diversified spread when it comes to the surviving distribution channels
I don't know how true that really is Everything I've read suggests that exercising monopoly power requires very high market shares when it comes to fungible products with low marginal cost, like delivery of e-books. Example citation: section A.2. of http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/reports/236681_chapter2.ht...
I think monopoly power is especially difficult with digital distribution because the company is using technology that everyone else has access to. If Amazon suddenly started overcharging, it would not be difficult for Barnes and Noble or someone else to take over their business.
This is why free software like Apache and Linux is so important. However big Amazon gets, as long as other companies, however small, have the necessary technology to provide similar services and the option to scale operations with increased business, Amazon has to offer superior services and prices to stay competitive. Book publishers, on the other hand, use specialized factories and distribution networks to throw their power around. With commoditized servers, free software, and an open Internet, Amazon can't leverage those same unique advantages.
I disagree, the technology is necessary but not sufficient. To compete as a distributor of mass consumer goods, you need a distribution infrastructure (warehouses, trucks, servers and the logistics operation to run them). The technology that makes up trucks, warehouses and servers may be commoditized, but the ability to own and operate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of them, with enough profit to keep growing the fleet every year - that's a very real barrier to entry because customers like getting their purchases the next day or even the same day, and doing that consistently for many customers requires that kind of a fleet.
On top of that, you need a way to reach customers online. The brand is sticky enough that many people start their book search directly on Amazon. To get a chance to compete for that search (presumably on Google) you'll need to hope that they find the price outrageous enough to overcome the promise of a convenient and reliable next-day delivery, pre-configured shipping and billing, etc.
Lastly Amazon is working hard to move the battle away from the open web: once a customer has a Kindle, the bar is even higher to compete for their future purchases.
I agree with what you are saying, but I was talking specifically about digital distribution. Closed platforms like Kindle definitely cause some lockdown, but Kindles are relatively cheap and replaced as often as yearly. If Amazon did start gouging on prices, a lot of people would switch to Kobo or Nook.
With digital distribution, you can guarantee that everything you're selling is always available for free (with the risk of legal fines) from other channels. Companies like Spotify, Netflix, and Amazon's digital distribution are aware that they are competing with free and tailor their services to be worth the cost. Physical goods that require factories and distribution centers will be a barrier to entry for a long time, at least until commodity 3d printers can compete with large-scale factories, which will take some time.
I see a future where hyper-low-volume printers paired with warehousing and delivery logistics providers (Amazon) and crowd-funded _investing_ for advances replace and eliminate the rent extraction of the big publishers in film, print, and music.
I want to live in a world where the creators set their own prices and reap the most benefits.
> I see a future where hyper-low-volume printers paired with warehousing and delivery logistics providers (Amazon) and crowd-funded _investing_ for advances replace and eliminate the rent extraction of the big publishers in film, print, and music.
By silicon valley computer-nerd salary standards, advances are... very small amounts of money. Like not even a nice car amounts of money.
the same goes for printing a few thousand copies of a book. And amazon will ship for you, if that's what you want.
Advertising is hard - and getting it into stores that aren't online-only is also hard
but discounting those two aspects? your average silicon-valley computer nerd could drive an older ford rather than a new car that is more appropriate to his or her station and use the difference to publish a book. It's not something that requires a huge amount of money.
My point, though, is that if you really feel strongly that the publishing houses aren't adding value, you can do this right now. If you are a silicon valley computer nerd, you don't even need investors or other people's permission. Hell, you don't even have to come up with more than the advance until the book is done.
I'm thinking something like an Espresso book printer scaled up to a small (mostly) automated factory serving logistics companies (shippers and warehousers like Amazon) and local book shops. The key being the possibility of producing a large volume of books per day but down to ones of copies per title eliminating the up front cost of 10,000 units (or whatever a reasonable industry standard is).
Doesn't Amazon already run their own POD press? One of the rumored disputes with Hachette is that Amazon wants access to digital masters so they can print books on demand, if the publisher is unable to supply physical copies for any logistical reason. That's like demanding access to software source code.
considering http://www.diybookscanner.org/ and the speed with which illegal texts of books popped up on the internet even before drm-breaking of ebooks was a thing, i think it's like demanding access to the source code of an unobfuscated python program you've already been given. getting the source isn't hard; the only hurdle is a legal one.
i find it hard to believe that 1) amazon would violate contracts on something like that or 2) if they did, hachette would somehow suffer financially, but not notice, or be unable to do anything about it.
I believe Amazon already does, but the future isn't an Amazon monolith controlling the entire vertical infrastructure.
The correct future is many printing businesses competing with each other, many logistics and shipping companies competing with each other, all separate and competing amongst themselves for the business of both content creators and content consumers. It doesn't work right if authors are 'vendor locked' into Amazon's printing and distribution network, it needs to be a many-to-many printers-to-distributors network with healthy competition for the "right future".
There are likely quite a few underutilized Espresso printers out there today. Just noticed that http://www.ondemandbooks.com/ is a search engine that links to the handful of stores which have a printer.
Hugh Howey is really one of my favorite Authors and I picked up all of his books on the Kindle. I probably wouldn't know him if he'd signed with brick-and-mortar stores for paper books, as I stopped buying those dust-magnets.
It seems the case that the life of a company also follows the Dark Knight quote "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." That is, when a company starts, we all invest because we want our chance to become majority stake holders in the next big monopoly destroyer. Once a company accomplishes this, it becomes a target just as the company(ies) it replaced. I'm no expert and I could be overly generalizing, but am I the only one that sees a problem with the fundamental form company growth takes today?
This is probably a cognitive bias obtained from reading the industry trade press.
There's a notable alternative -- you don't have a meteoric rise to giant status, but you also don't collapse. These sorts of "happy medium" companies are in the vast majority even in our industry, but they're less likely to end up on the front page of a news feed, esp. those biased toward the fast growth (startup) community.
Also, you forgot the last stage. After becoming super rich, the CEO gets inspired by something other than heading up a vilified corporation, then goes off and founds a foundation that does great humanitarian work. Now that the company is not on top and the founder is doing exclusively good stuff for humanity, no one hates either anymore :-)
edit: fixed pronouns and adjectives because it pointed ambiguously in the sentence.
Companies follow a pattern of rapid growth, dominance, senescence, then irrelevance as other companies eat their lunch.
Kodak is a prime example. So's RCA (who remembers them?). Sears. IBM. Xerox. All once considered unstoppable juggernauuts.
In fact, the conventional wisdom is that companies inevitably grow to take over the world. There are no instances of this happening - there are only cases where a company survived senescence by successfully making their competition illegal.
What about Standard Oil? Exxon Mobil is still the 3rd largest company by revenue in the world. If it was combined with another baby Standard Oil, Chevron, it would be the largest company in the world.
Great question. In the biography of Rockefeller "Titan", the book notes that Standard Oil's market share was steadily declining throughout the antitrust trial, and Rockefeller was unable to stem the bleeding.
I totally agree. In the tech industry at least, stock performance seems totally driven by growth. Companies that stop growing for a few quarters are seen as failures, when maybe they just reached an equilibrium for a while.
I would think that equilibrium was fine, maybe even a good sign- it's a successful business that's humming along. But short-term investors want to see growth, so they can cash out their investment in a few months or years.
The positive aspect of all of this is that it constantly drives evolution and innovation through competition. The part that sucks is that businesses are forced to constantly grow (or waste lots of money on failed attempts to grow), until they get so big compared to their optimal size that they just stop making sense as companies and crumble under their own weight.
Supposedly the plan for the Amazon online store has always been to barely break even to establish their customer base, then to raise the prices of items to start making money. They started doing that last year when the price of their products started being more than competitors. The increased price of Prime was acceptable to me, but when I can go to a local store and purchase the items for cheaper, then that's the price increase that I do not want. Their algorithms determine the maximum amount of money they can make off of customers rather than basing it off of what the products actually cost, it makes sense for short-term profits, long-term profits are difficult to predict.
An oft-suggested plan, but I have yet to see convincing evidence that this is what they will do. I would guess given the plays that they have been making that they think they can reduce the cost of servicing orders, and make their money that way. The idea that they would achieve a monopoly and then raise prices seems silly, since the government would likely clamp down on that kind of strategy. And everything about their investments suggests that they think of themselves as a logistics company, not a monopolist.
Big publishers turn down good authors(more often than usual) and no one bats an eye.
Amazon delays delivery of books from one publisher, just because the publisher's terms were unfair and everybody loses their minds.
I think Amazon should split it's company between AWS and the Amazon store.
AWS is great and is a very important part of the internet these days, it would be a shame to have their quality decrease if the Amazon store ever starts losing money.
The Amazon store has too many flaws. There is a huge opportunity for a competitor to come in. It would be easy for "Walmart Online" to be a significant competitor to Amazon in a very short time, I don't think they're trying too hard for some reason though (fear of cannibalism of current walmart customers maybe).
I would pay 10 cent per item to be able to pick out items online and have them boxed at the customer service desk at Walmart, that sounds reasonable and profitable for both parties, doesn't it?
1+ years ago I was a huge Amazon.com supporter, these days I will avoid them if possible. Their prices and shipping changed, plus they won't allow people to always filter out all of the "not sold or shipped by Amazon" products which I absolutely do not want to have constantly clutter my search results. I've ordered several products from Amazon which they did not have in stock (but did not say they didn't), this resulted in long shipping times and in a few cases they automatically ordered the "not sold by Amazon" product and had it shipped to me, that product was very near expired (as is the case with many of them) and I have no clue where it came from, for all I know they found found it in a hot warehouse that was sold.
Then there are the "not sold by Amazon" sellers who charge huge Amounts for products just hoping that people accidentally order them. The reviews will be from people who ordered the Amazon.com version and automatically promote the seller just trying to trick people. Huge flaws in your system Amazon, get it fixed please. Don't even get me started on the "we've passed your package off to your local carrier, there's no telling when it'll get delivered and you'll probably have to drive somewhere to pick it up", that they refuse to fix. I canceled my Prime account out of protest and now they delay shipping my product for at least 7 days then they 2 day or overnight ship my items, wtf Amazon.
AWS is far more vulnerable to online competition right now than Amazon the retailer is. There's several companies that have the available infrastructure to compete with Amazon in the cloud... Google and Microsoft are already out there, and Amazon is finding themselves cutting prices to compete.
Nobody really has Amazon's physical goods delivery infrastructure. You can look at Wal-Mart and Target, but they have infrastructure designed to solve a very different problem, getting large amounts of the same goods to certain physical stores. They rely on semi-truck drivers to deliver palettes of goods to stores. What they don't have, for example, is Amazon's very close relationships to UPS and USPS. Could they develop it? Maybe. At great expense. Would they be able to peel off more existing Amazon customers than they'd be cannibalizing their own current sales? Who knows.
I was not suggesting that Walmart compete in home delivery, I was thinking that they should ship things to their store (which as you mentioned they already have that system in place) where it would be boxed up and ready for pickup by customers (because everyone has a walmart fairly close to them, and that's a huge advantage). The cost to them would be minimal and the customers they would gain that have been using online shopping with shipping to their homes could be significant. Even for a small surcharge it would be worth it to me.
>The cost to them would be minimal and the customers they would gain that have been using online shopping with shipping to their homes could be significant.
This does not compute. They already have ship-to-store, and have had for quite a while. It hasn't made a significant impact on their online power. Customers don't want to drive to a Walmart to pickup their online order. That's an extra step for no reason.
Site-to-store does indeed solve a problem. If there is something I want at Wal-Mart, then I have to find it. Not only that, after finding it I need to stand on a long check-out line. With site-to-store, I get it on the web site, then just go to the back of the store and pick it up. The problem is that at Wal-Mart it can be a crap shoot as to whether the site-to-store place is properly staffed.
I actually use the Home Depot site-to-store equivalent much more than the Wal-Mart one [probably several times a month, vs. once or twice a year]. Home Depot gets it right. There are still occasional problems, and it would be better if they could fulfill the orders faster, but it still avoids having to search for stuff, which I consider to be of significant value.
For driving it really depends on the city and the persons situation. Many people drive by a walmart on their commute, the ability to order something in the morning then pick it up on the way home would be convenient. For businesses someone could order something the night before and pick it up in the morning and use it at work that day, that would be very valuable.
Everyone has a Wal-Mart fairly close to them? I think more people have the ability to reliably receive UPS deliveries than have a Wal-Mart close to them. Who wants to drive into the suburbs to buy stuff?
Walmart Online to dominate Amazon? Walmart has been trying hard in the online space for ages! What indicates they aren't trying hard? I'm sure they're trying as hard as possible. A major problem for Walmart is engineering talent. Top engineers don't want to work for Walmart. The brand has negative value for an engineer. Innovation and the ability to leap frog will be hindered by this brand problem.
And as far as "pick out items online and have them boxed at the customer service desk". Yes, it does sound reasonable - in fact they've been doing this almost since day one (Site-to-store). It's obvious and it doesn't solve any real problem. I don't want to have to get in my car, deal with traffic, park in a huge parking lot, wade through crowds and Walmart, wait for a disinterested customer service rep to find my online order (let's hope they didn't forget anything), ring me up, then haul everything back to my car, drive home, etc.
I want to click a button for what I want, then open my door that same day and see my items sitting there waiting for me. That is human progress and innovation that Walmart isn't going to be able to match.
If it is then I can't figure out how to use it. Those were just the two items I would like to purchase and typed in first.
Regarding the "click a button for what I want, then open my door that same day and see my items sitting there waiting for me", that's not true for many places. I live in a tech-focused capital city and shipping is at least 2 days for Prime but I've had it take much longer (yes, for items sold by Amazon). I regularly see Amazon do the "our shipping carrier handed your item to USPS and we are no longer responsible for how long it takes" routine and it is completely unacceptable.
Once they get the site-to-store thing right (in it's current state you are correct, it has flaws) then they should offer some kind of large promotion to encourage people to register and use their service one time. Right now I'm hesitant to register and start shopping with Walmart, I don't have a logical reason for this though.
Real innovation will be when I can order and pay online, then send out my autonomous vehicle to walmart, then one of their employees will put the items in my car and the car will drive home and text or email me when it arrives. That's probably 10 years away but it will happen.
As for the point of items there same day/next-day, that is the problem Amazon Fresh is trying to solve. I have it here locally and it is pretty much amazing.
For the last point - why send out your autonomous vehicle and deal with employees at all? That's so 2024 (as you said). I want an autonomous Amazon Fresh truck, or maybe even an Amazon Prime drone to deliver to me. No employees needed, no human inefficiency.
"For the last point - why send out your autonomous vehicle and deal with employees at all? That's so 2024 (as you said). I want an autonomous Amazon Fresh truck, or maybe even an Amazon Prime drone to deliver to me. No employees needed, no human inefficiency."
Several reasons. It would work with any store or even fast-food/restaurants, sending my car to pick up a burger would be fantastic. Human employees walking the packages to your car (which would have a special lane in front of the store) could be easily replaced by a robot, at the moment it's just cheaper to have a human do the task. For many people who need a low paying and low skill job, that would be a great opportunity for them, there wouldn't be any dealing with customers either.
How would the autonomous delivery trucks you are talking about actually deliver the packages? The very difficult part would be getting the packages from the vehicle to the person's door. It would not work if it required the customers to come outside to pick up the packages, people wouldn't be home, they might be busy at the moment, it would be difficult to ensure they don't take the wrong or someone elses packages. I've considered that before and I just can't figure out a way for that to work.
The drones are also impractical and could only be used for small items. You would basically need a landing zone in your yard, I just don't see that happening nor being part of the free shipping. In my opinion the drone announcement was just a research project (that was full of flaws that can't be overcome) or a marketing stunt.
> How would the autonomous delivery trucks you are talking about actually deliver the packages? The very difficult part would be getting the packages from the vehicle to the person's door. It would not work if it required the customers to come outside to pick up the packages, people wouldn't be home, they might be busy at the moment, it would be difficult to ensure they don't take the wrong or someone elses packages. I've considered that before and I just can't figure out a way for that to work.
Tightly specified mailboxes.
Imagine that if you installed a special "UP-EX" mail box, you could receive packages securely when not at home. The truck has an arm that places the item directly into the receptacle.
> How would the autonomous delivery trucks you are talking about actually deliver the packages?
For the first iteration, I'd have a human take the boxes from the truck to the door. The truck would have one of those laser designators like Kiva uses for amazon warehouses to help the human pick the box. The difference is that the human is a minimum wage drone instead of a unionized teamster, so the savings could be quite substantial.
Plus, since the truck is automated, it doesn't have to be static while the picker is out running with the package.
I have experienced the problem, but I have no idea as to the reasoning or lack thereof behind it.
I love to order my groceries to be delivered, it's very convenient. But I generally fail to order them significantly far enough (24 hours!) in advance, and end up going to the supermarket anyway. I would love same-day delivery. Don't ask me the reason, because I don't know it!
I disagree with most of your points, but agree somewhat with the non-sold by Amazon nonsense, and the generally poor quality of 3rd party sellers. You have to be very watchful with this. Not using Prime isolates you from this pretty well, as you can easily filter by items available under Prime shipping terms, and 3rd party sellers that put their stuff in the Amazon warehouses to make them Prime eligible avoid the slow shipping problems and are generally not an issue. However, the third party sellers on there are giving them a bad reputation, because people are not distinguishing them from Amazon proper.
I seriously doubt there is any personal retaliation going on.
I don't think they should split the business, as one of the things that makes AWS good is that it has to keep Amazon running. The initial concept of AWS as something that Amazon can use to meet demand peaks, while selling excess capacity makes a lot of sense.
This has the option for a single product from Amazon, or a "2 pack" for a $100 surcharge from some random supplier. This is on MOST products from Amazon and a real pain in the ass to avoid. I hate that Amazon allows this crap which is basically spam. I would be willing to bet that the supplier simply orders 2 of these products from Amazon after the purchase, then ships them out to you and makes $100. It offers zero benefit to Amazon's customers, but it's a rampant issue.
There's also the companies with names such as "Prime inc." which are just trying to trick people.
They probably make the most money off of assistants or employees who are asked to purchase a product and don't really look at the prices or shipping.
Imagine this scenario: I send the link above to one of my family members saying this is the product they need for their doors. They see 2-pack and immediately click it and continue through the checkout process, because I had told them this was the best value product and I had done the research for them.
A query parameter such as (?only_show_amazon=true) would help the issue, or better yet would be a permanent setting, but Amazon doesn't see the problem with allowing these sellers or products. Maybe utilizing the Amazon API and creating a website to avoid this would be a solution.
AWS was never really something to sell excess capacity, thats a myth. And anyway now, it is vastly bigger than Amazon's compute needs. The stockmarket would like it to be sold off, but not sure it will be.
It would be terrifying if AWS was just Amazon's excess capacity, as then one might want to ask what would happen when Amazon suddenly needed the capacity... Apart from for spot instances, a lot of people have never seemed to get that Amazon needs to over-provision massively because of how the product works, and that their customers still need to cover the cost of all that over capacity.
No one said it was "just" Amazon's excess capacity. However, they do use it...so it is way of not paying for their excess capacity, just like everyone else's use is.
I have had excellent experience with Amazon. In reading the reviews of a couple of high end monitors that I am considering, I see that Amazon will give a refund even when the seller will not. I imagine Amazon hammers them back into line.
My only complaint is when they ship by FedEx. In my town FedEx hands packages off to the Post Office, where two day delivery becomes three or four.
If anything, AWS is overrated. It already has some decent competitors and more will grow up soon, though they're massively underutilized. The idea that Amazon itself is critical to internet infrastructure is very disturbing, yet in many cases, it's true these days. We really need to get other cloud providers in the mix.
Amazon as a retail store has been consistently great for me in all major aspects. Any issues I've had with orders have been promptly resolved and Amazon has gone to bat for me several times. I agree that Wal-mart or another major department store could give Amazon a run for its money if they played their cards right, but like you, I don't think they're in that headspace.
SES is really the only AWS service that has not been done by anyone else as far as I know. Some of the SES features (spam reporting for instance) requires cooperation between email service providers and Amazon, something that many other companies would have difficulty arranging.
Yeah, the issue isn't really that there are no similar services available, it's just that people don't really use those services very much. There are several search engines competing against Google too, but if Google blackballs your site and you're dependent on organic search traffic, you're still going to lose 90% of your visitors overnight.
Internet infrastructure is pretty important, so it's a little more disconcerting to me if some huge percentage of sites are dependent on the same single ISP/datacenter/etc.
The right way to implement "ship to store" is using something like "amazon locker". Assuming that's the correct route, amazon will win, because it can choose better locations than a walmart store . And in retail location is everything.
But the fact that amazon has tried some lockers but it doesn't seem the common way to buy stuff, and there's no huge scaling effort from amazon, seems to indicate that people prefer to recieve packages at home.
And bezos understands that in this game, if you want to make profits, you need for customers to love using your services.Having that ability at low enough costs could earn you a monopoly. And than might be the time to play with "amazon lockers" and other cost cutting measures.
The Amazon Lockers seem to only benefit Amazon because the shipping is much cheaper for them. If they offered a discount or credit for using the lockers then it could potentially be a useful service.
What is the benefit of using an Amazon Locker rather than shipping to your home? Maybe in neighborhoods that have a high stealing packages percentage.
The term lockers also imply (incorrectly) that they are supposed to be purchased by people for packages to be shipped to (like a PO box), the name might be hurting their success.
I think that shipping fees for amazon are much lower than prices offered for people at say ups. Offering half of that, wouldn't be attractive and will probably hurt the amazon brand.
From my experience the difference is that they delay shipping your item. They claim to have one of the best shipping and handling systems in the world but for some reason they save money by delaying boxing an order for a week, it doesn't really make sense to me. I think they're really just trying to get people to purchase Prime.
I'm sure that there's an aspect of what you say at work, but I can also imagine that they have a certain amount of "pick and pack" capacity at their fulfillment centers.
By choosing 2-day, you're forcing Amazon to pick and pack that order today probably, tomorrow at the very latest.
By choosing "no rush", you allow them flexibility to fulfill from a wide variety of centers, on a wide variety of days. Maybe there's a weekly cycle in order volume and no rush orders may allow them to even that out with a more constant labor force.
In the UK they also offers "Collect Plus" - a delivery option where they ship to a participating nearby corner store and you pick it up from the tills. In my case it's a 3 minute walk to the nearest Collect Plus location, and they're "everywhere" near us, or we have 15 minute bus ride to the nearest locker..
I'm with you with the splitting, I don't think these to fields belong together and they can work much more independently with a split. But they probably will only split if one half goes down :\
But I like the Amazon store quite much, don't know any other company that offers a similar service (in Europe/Germany).
Should there ever appear a seemingly real fault line in Amazon's long game, I think at some point they'd be forced to sell the infrastructure / hosting platform to keep investors happy.
In the end, I think writers, publishers, and Amazon alike will all lose in their efforts to profit from the sale of information. Information is moving closer and closer to being free. And that's a good thing.
That fine, so long as you've figured out a way to provide authors food, shelter, and health care via alternate means. Otherwise, we will see people less willing to put the work into making great literature.
It isn't that the author is motivated by money as much as great work is all but impossible when fit between the gaps of everything else. Professional authors spend months of full time work to put out a book.
Worse, we will still get works, but they won't be as well-edited, well-researched, and those take a toll on quality.
Even today, only the superstar authors actually earn any decent money from their writing.
You're absolutely right that we need to find a way to provide people food, shelter, and health care. It's true today and it will be true in the future. And it's true for everyone, not just superstar authors.
Publishers will continue to have a role as curators of information, but they're going to have to change their business model. Instead of profiting through the sale and distribution of information, they'll have to earn money by selling their editing and curating services.
Amazon will be fine. They'll always find products to sell. It just might not be books or movies or other forms of information.
Edit: People already are less willing to put the work into creating great literature. Being a writer is not a reliable way to earn a living. Imagine how much creative potential we might unlock with something like a basic income.
If you want to buy a book they publish, you are a click away from bying it from http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ or from Apple if you want it on your ipad.
But if Amazon wants to sell it they have no choice but to get it from the conglomerate Hachette.
My favorite comment on this so far comes from Hugh Howey (author of the WOOL series)at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hugh-howey/winning-at-monopoly...
From that article.
“The real monopoly, once you start examining business practices and attitudes, is Big Publishing itself,”
"Where is the outcry for Amazon-published authors who are blocked from sale by practically every brick and mortar store? It doesn't exist. The response is simply: That's what those authors get for signing with Amazon. Imagine an observer today saying, "That's what those authors get for signing with Hachette." The hypocrisy astounds."