First things first, if you're interested in following publishing industry stuff in a regular way, you MUST read Maya Reynolds' blog . She's excellent at (a) staying on top of major developments and (b) explaining them in clear language, along with their implications. This post was inspired, in part, by her reportage. So, as you may have heard, Amazon is the current market leader in the sales of ebook readers. It's Kindle has, according to some reports, 68% of the market share for ebook devices. Unfortunately, Amazon hasn't been a very benevolent monopolist in the book market in general. It's been dictatorial with authors who want to self-publish, requiring its own print-on-demand service . It even attempted, in January of this year, to coerce publisher Macmillan into accepting its terms by removing the buy buttons from that publisher's books when Macmillan wouldn't agree to let Amazon set the price of its ebooks at $9.99 (Macmillan wanted the abi
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