Indeed. I am very happy with switching to electronic books for novels & c., but it is exceedingly clear to me that _somebody_ is profiting here, even at $0.99, and it is not the authors, but rather the intermediaries who act as centralized controls over the flow, and make sure that their monopoly status is hard to challenge.
(Or: Amazon self-publishing as the Elsevier of electronic books; discuss.)

" if some policy increases consumption of something with zero marginal cost (an idea, an academic paper, a song, an e-book, etc.), a minimum, necessary condition to restrict that policy is that the variety of affected new goods must decrease. So if music piracy increases the number of songs consumed (and the number of songs illegally downloaded in any period of time is currently much higher than worldwide sales during that period), a minimum economic justification for a government crackdown on piracy is that the number of new songs created has decreased (in this case, they have not). Applying The First Law to open access mandates, a minimum economic justification for opposing such mandates is that either open access has no benefits, or that open access will make peer reviewed journals economically infeasible."