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I was referring to these smaller firms as was addressed in the comment.

Regarding the major book selling firms, Amazon are the good guys because a relatively few book firms control the market. Amazon is helping to improve the customer experience by lowering the price of books.

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> Amazon are the good guys because a relatively few book firms control the market. Amazon is helping to improve the customer experience by lowering the price of books.

they're replacing an oligopoly that is exploiting their customers with a monopoly though.

amazon hasn't really started exploiting its monopoly status yet (to my knowledge) toward the consumers, but a lot of authors have already started to complain about it.

I looked into this issue awhile ago and may have even written about it in HN. The publishers are trying to take a larger share of the income from Amazon for eBooks over traditional publishing leaving the authors with less than before even though production costs for publishers are far lower for eBooks. Amazon was trying to work to get authors at least the same proportion of the money they get for eBooks as for hardcopy traditional books.

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