[bambax]

The competitor of Amazon is Google.

If you're an author the absolute best you can hope to get is 35% of the sale price -- that is, the price your readers are willing to pay to read your work. Usually, it's even much less.

The publisher keeps at least 35%; the distributor, 30%. It's unclear to me what value these actors are offering, for this amount of money.

Disintermediation hasn't happened yet (what happened is, Amazon took the place of bookstores, and publishers are still around).

But disintermediation will happen eventually; when that day comes this discussion will sound silly and strange.