Clearly this is not a good trend, but I will make two points in Amazon's defense. All of this, and auctions too, which has frightened eBay to the point that the company is considering adding fixed price items to its site. She states that publishing houses, or better yet, authors themselves will sell their own works directly to consumers. She points to direct-sell companies like Dell to back her point. In addition, a store like Amazon brings consistency and security to the on-line shopping experience.
People like to have and keep books.
That's why bookshelves are such a popular piece of furniture. Well Doherty states that there are 550 titles available electronically, Monica's Story , among the most notable. So for all practical purposes, there are 549 titles available. Doesn't quite hold a candle to Amazon's 4.5 million some-odd. And beyond that, I would think that Amazon is probably the company currently best positioned to get into electronic book distribution when that becomes more main-stream.