It seems Amazon is trying to step up its bid for global domination by requiring it be allowed to actually print books. A LICENCE TO PRINT BOOKS!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27994314

Well, amongst other things, I suppose. They probably are in the business of destroying publishers and setting themselves up in their place. I'm not sure it's been THAT great for music to see this happening there but I think, at least, there is a different sort of setup: bands have that ability to play live and home recording and production are fairly well done.

With authors doing their own stuff I feel like you really do need editors and publishers to provide more quality control.

Anyway, what I'd like to see if publishers embracing e-book technology fully and using that to screw Amazon over: Amazon have loss-led Kindle to the point where the device is ubiquitous, but it's not completely locked down: it can read any book that isn't copy protected, so probably publishers have to do what the music industry did and produce the e-books themselves but in a format that isn't locked to a single device. There's a certain risk, but they might well be able to get a lot of consumers interested because people now have the means to read those books.

Personally, I just don't want to own physical books any more but it feels like my options are going to be "or Amazon" for quite a while, now if I want the most convenient format.