[bborud]

Have we really come to a point where the only business structures we can envision are huge monopolies playing zero-sum games?

Imagine if every publisher offered every book to every service that sells it to consumers? And are free to sell their own and other publishers books? They could even include Amazon. Yes, it would require DRM and a bit of software infrastructure, but guess what: they could choose to fund development of an open source system for managing this.

They can do this. But they won’t. They’d rather be beholden to Bezos and not even try.

I’ll repeat myself: they’d rather get collectively screwed than risk that a competitor might get a small advantage.

[swores]

Slow reply, but: good points!