Even as a monopoly, why would Amazon do that? The cost of distributing another ebook is negligible (and may even effectively be negative if the competitive advantages of a larger catalog outweigh the server, bandwidth and other operating costs).

It seems to me that, even as a monopoly, Amazon doesn't really care whether the books they sell are mainstream or non-mainstream as long as they make as much money as they can from them. And that doesn't mean jacking up the retail price just for the hell of it (or squeezing authors for fun). That means trying to gather enough data to estimate the supply and demand curves and pricing based on that (something Amazon is already good at).

I think authors are likely to get squeezed regardless because, like musicians, there are too many that are willing to write for (effectively) free just to get the lottery ticket for the big leagues. On the consumer side, it is important to remember that every book is already a tiny little monopoly of its own, so it isn't clear which way things will go if they are aggregated.

Only mainstream literature is commercially viable in the status quo.

There are more professional concert pianists in the UK than full-time authors of fiction.

Name three monopolies that were broken up while it made a difference. In which of those cases did consumer prices go down as a result of the breakup?

The only "broken up while it made a difference" case that I'm aware of is Standard Oil. However, the result was higher prices, not lower. (Standard absolutely hammered transportation companies and passed on the savings to consumers. After the breakup, transportation companies could turn down biz from one oil company to get biz from another and thus were able to raise their prices. That's why railroads pushed for the breakup.)

The carterfone decision, which happened before that, is what gave us phone choice.

There was some post-breakup price-reduction in local services, but they all came from the local monopolies that were the result of the AT&T breakup. The services themselves, with the exception of caller-id, were offered by pre-breakup AT&T but were more expensive. Since the land-line service price decline happened when cell-phone carriers started offering those same services for less, I think that cell-phone competition gets the credit, not the breakup.

And beige was available before green. (I think that white was as well.)

I thought that I said that.

> That whole industry was part of the windfall.

How so? Are you claiming that AT&T would have been granted a cell-phone monopoly if it hadn't been broken up? If so, why weren't the baby bells, which still had a land-line monopoly, given a cell phone monopoly?

I think that the success of sprint et al wrt long distance by the time that cell-phones were taking off pretty much guaranteed that there AT&T wouldn't be granted a cell phone monoply even if the break-up hadn't occurred.