| The publishing industry was disrupted by technology in 2007 when Amazon released the Kindle. It took a few years, but for a while, independent book authors were rivalling the "Big Five" publishers in terms of both sales volume and books sold. Part of this was driven by the big publishers' response to indies: they raised the price of their own eBooks to protect their hardcover market. They even illegally colluded with each other, along with Apple, to force these higher prices across the industry. But they were sued and lost, and the result was a lowering of big publisher eBook prices across the board. On the independent side, the problem was that too many people were publishing too many books. It was impossible to keep up, and there was no good system for finding the "best" independent authors, since tastes are so subjective and the vast majority of independent authors didn't have any money to spend on marketing anyway. So that leads us to today, where the "Big Four" (trying to become the Big Three) still have access to their promotional machinery, which includes retail bookstores. There are a very few insanely successful independent authors, and a veeeeeery long tail of folks that have no way of getting noticed in the crowd. Still, the sales volume of traditional publishing and independent publishing remains about equivalent even today (it's hard to get exact numbers because Amazon doesn't like giving them out, but apps like KindleSpy offer a broad estimate) It's just that the latter is spread out among many more authors. |
Did it? I must have missed that bit. As far as I can tell, the only result of the case against the publishers & Apple has been government enforced Amazon control of the ebook market.