Charles Stross!  I flew to America to buy a copy of Merchant Princes.  Well, OK, not really: I tried to buy it in Japan from my Kindle with the intention of reading it on my annual trip back, and I was denied because of some licensing agreement your publisher had.  I eventually bought it while passing through Detroit Airport.<p>Despite the fact that this is ridiculously convenient for argument I am about to make, I am actually telling the truth: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1002315" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1002315</a><p>When you say"rent-seeking intermediaries" I think of a different player than you do.  See, Amazon makes my reading experience awesome.  Your publisher?  They have not made my experience awesome.  I know they spend a lot of money on, e.g., typesetting and wood pulp.  That must suck.  I am having a hard time mustering up sufficient sympathy to back your publisher's attempt to charge me more so that I can subsidize the continued practices which result in 50% of print runs getting pulped.<p>Is Amazon's contribution to total awesomeness worth 70%?  Eh, I don't know.  I'm a software vendor.  Google takes fifty cents out of the last dollar of sales for me (for advertising), despite the fact that I do all the "actual work".  I use the scare quotes because if the last couple of years have taught me anything it has taught me that making the sale -- which is what Amazon does for you -- is a non-trivial bit of the business equation.<p>I don't see my profit split with Google as a moral issue -- I see it as a fairly simple business decision.  To whit, I sure like getting that last fifty cents.  I think I managed to get about $20 of your books on my trip to America.  Now, I don't know whether you see $1 or $3 of that at the end of the day, but either is a darn sight better than $0, which is what your publisher is pushing hard for you to get from me.