I essentially find his argument incoherent. What's he complaining about, that publishers don't have the right to illegally fix prices? They can set prices to wh

I essentially find his argument incoherent. What's he complaining about, that publishers don't have the right to illegally fix prices? They can set prices to whatever they want but can do so on their own marketplaces. Amazon has the right to impose whatever it wants on their marketplace. You don't have to sell there. Now we can once again make this argument that Amazon dominates the marketplace and you HAVE to sell there to sell any books, but that argument is ridiculous. Plenty of small publishers are selling books solely by themselves or with limited agreements with independent marketplaces. This seems like sour grapes from more middlemen who are unneeded. This is why the music industry is so bitter--because the Internet makes them irrelevant. There will be a need for promotion, yes, but I'd rather pay a smart literary agent 15% or even 20% to handle that rather than some publisher where I'm basically getting dimes on the backend. I'm not aware of any promotion that Smashwords ever executed that reached me, so clearly they are not even doing a great job. It's a dark day for industry middlemen and that's it. BY THE WAY, I will pay a premium well over $20 if you distribute your ebooks in multiple DRM free formats. I just paid $40 for the InDesign CS5 Classroom in a Book yesterday which came with a PDF and an EPUB. If publishers are too lazy to do that, we have no use for them anyway.