I looked at the Pottermore website, which the author seems to think is a model for disrupting Amazon. They don't seem to sell physical books, just eBooks and di

I looked at the Pottermore website, which the author seems to think is a model for disrupting Amazon. They don't seem to sell physical books, just eBooks and digital audio books. Fulfillment and distribution of physical items at a large scale is probably beyond the means of an individual author. Where they sell eBooks, Pottermore is branded with a Sony logo and it looks like Sony is running the store. So lets say that other big authors decide they want to do what JK Rowling is doing, run a store themselves and get the customer data. Couldn't Amazon say to the authors: "Okay, you run your store and get your data, but we'll handle the payments and the fulfillment for you instead of Sony. That way the customer can use their Amazon account and can take advantage of Amazon's customer service. Plus we can actually ship physical objects if they don't want ebooks." In that case it seems like Amazon could probably make just as much money as they are now. In fact, if you look at a lot of Kindle books they are actually sold by the publishers (Hatchette, Random House, etc.) rather than by Amazon, so it seems like that's what Amazon is already doing to some extent. I don't see the desire for better data as a disrupting factor for Amazon. There are some areas where Amazon needs to get better - recommendations and reviews are one and making it easier to actually find the one product out of 30,000 available that you want is another. That's a pretty hard problem to solve.