I get that survival of the fittest is a part of the picture here, but I'm feeling not too charitable towards Amazon right now. Their success owes a lot to innovation, sure, but also to bullying behavior and general codpiece swinging. They've never made it easy for small presses to deal with them, and they've just declared war on some major distributors, which is bad for everyone involved but which I guess they believe will cut out the middlemen and eventually help clear the field of competition.

But as the wise man said, “About 50% of the human race is middlemen and they don’t take kindly to being eliminated.”