Yeah, as Charlie Stross pointed out on his blog some time ago, the publishers effectively demanded that Amazon have a monopoly on the eBook reading public & only now are they (slowly) realising that this might not have been a great idea. Bezos must have been laughing all the way home from those meetings...
It's worth noting that some of the publishers have woken up and taken corrective action.
Holtzbrinck, a giant German family owned publishing conglomerate you probably haven't heard of, actually owns Macmillan, who you might have heard of, who own Tor, who you probably have heard of if you're part of the regular HN demographic. A few months ago they came to the same conclusion, and have dropped mandatory DRM on genre fiction titles. I believe they're also open to arguments both for and against DRM on other publishing categories, rather than maintaining the doctrinaire "DRM on everything" policy of some of the other Big Six.
The long term effect of this policy is ... well, it remains to be seen. Because publishers traditionally sold to wholesalers who sold to bookstores, they don't routinely sell direct to the public. A move by any of the big publishers to set up a direct-sales channel for ebooks, rivaling Amazon or Barnes and Noble, would probably be seen as hostile or monopolistic by the bookseller trade, and might even generate anti-trust lawsuits! But I'd be unsurprised to see one of the Big Six (now Five) follow the example of smaller direct-sales publishers sooner rather than later -- like http://www.webscription.net/ for example.
But this does seem like the sort of role that the Internet tends to disintermediate. If I can get ebooks straight from the publisher in standardized formats that aren't DRM-encumbered, thus allowing me to use any reader I choose, what value is Amazon bringing me that Google is not already bringing me? Nonzero, I think, but not enough to sustain their business on.
Heck, even the publisher stands in risk of being disintermediated here, let alone Amazon functioning as essentially a fourth party in the relationship.
Whereas I find they bring me a lot of value as an intermediary of physical goods. Sometimes I try to order something straight from, say, a food vendor, but always end up choking on the fact the food vendor wants to charge me $15 shipping on my $30 order, because the food vendor's idea of shipping is the local Fedex drop point and Amazon's idea of shipping appears to involve some sort of teleportation technology.
That's why I said only "at risk of" and not that it was certain. But, as is the way of the internet, it's not hard to imagine in ten years that the many things you say go into the publisher's set of responsibilities could themselves be dispersed to more than one entity. Publishers previously had an effectively-physical moat around that set of tasks, because they had control over the book and essentially force you to consume all the services from them to get to the physical book. Now they're going to have to ensure they are bringing value throughout the process.
Which in your domain, they probably will. But this is one way of viewing the ever-growing academic revolt against Elsevier. They do a couple of their duties OK, but the whole bundle they are providing is increasingly less compelling vs. what they are trying to charge.
Alas, "publishing" is actually about a dozen different business models flying in loose formation. Generalizing from, say, trade fiction publishing to peer-reviewed academic journals to text books to newspapers is, shall we say, not going to work terribly well.
I didn't. If you find it not unlikely that some publishers may themselves be disintermediated in whole or in part, that's all the support I need for the point I made. I never said that all publishers are doomed. I only said that given that publishers are themselves going to be facing this sort of pressure, even if some survive it quite well, how much more so would Amazon, trying to be a fourth party in the already-pressured three-way reader/publisher/author relationship.
And if you look at the Amazon music store, which was DRM free from the get-go (and probably paved the way for Apple to negotiate with its own content providers for DRM free music), it's hard to think of Amazon as being on the side of DRM.
Currently, of the two DRM-laden e-mediums Amazon sells (books and videos), both have DRM because the publishers insist on it.
