Amazon is behaving like Walmart here: squeezing suppliers in order to provide lower prices.<p>Walmart is certainly not good for Walmart suppliers, because if you want to sell there, your profit margins will go down and down, and you will need higher and higher volume and lower and lower marginal costs. It's what Walmart does. The resulting type of product is generally known as <i>junk</i>.<p>Is it good for consumers? Probably, because low prices are good, and if you don't want junk, you can go elsewhere. If the same thing eventually happens for books, then Amazon will be selling mostly cheap and trashy stuff, while other, more expensive, online bookstores will show up and get exclusive deals with better authors.<p>In such a scenario, Patrick's comment:<p><i>I will buy books from authors willing to sell them to me.  I might get a little depressed over not being able to read my favorites, but if you haven’t noticed, I read a lot faster than you can possibly write and that makes me promiscuous by nature.</i><p>strikes me as wrong. While you may substitute other good stuff for good stuff, you won't substitute <i>The Duke's Boardroom Affair</i> for <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>.