Clash Of The Monopolists

I was asked to write a commentary for The Mark News on the roller coaster Amazon vs Macmillan fight that took place last week. Since there were so many other great articles and blog posts already out there talking about the specifics of pricing and what each party apparently did or stated, as well as who was right and who was wrong, I focused on something else.

The need for such a fight to take place.

The fact that pricing needs to be analyzed and discussed and continually brought to the surface.

And the ultimate fact that, at the end of the day, modern technology allows the two ultimate parties at either end of the chain (the writer at one end and the reader at the other), to completely circumvent all the in-between parties in the supply chain: the publisher, the distributor, the bookseller.

How, then, do these in-between parties survive in such a world?

By focusing on where they can ADD VALUE.