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I hope the Department of Justice is happy -- now that ebook monopolists like Amazon can charge whatever the hell they want, the price of books, like all other content, is rapidly approaching zero. The latest broken-down show pony to enter this race to the bottom is BookBoon, which publishes free ebooks that are supported through advertising.

Paging through their "business" titles, I randomly downloaded the book Motivation Skills, expecting hilarity to ensue. And it did not disappoint! The opening line of this book is:

One of the most commonly debated and researched fields in the business world is motivation.

TELL ME MORE.

Why do people do what they do and how can we motivate others to do what we need them to do in the business place?

The 'business place,' is where motivation happens! Wait what do they mean. The place of business? The business? I don't know what language these books are translated from, but I'm starting to get the same sinking feeling I experienced the first time I hit the homepage of the Huffington Post.

From BookBoon's press release:

While traditional book publishers are still struggling to find a viable business model for eBooks, Bookboon.com is taking a different approach. With their free eBooks they offer an alternative for the often unfair priced eBooks.

It's true, the price of the average eBook is outrageous. The last time I paid the about the same for an eBook as I do for my lunch, when the former required years of effort but the latter is delicious, I just about spit nails.

Now that books = content, I look forward to a decline in the already abysmal wages of most authors, lots of talk about the "long tail," and a missive from Seth Godin about how if only I knew how to market myself, none of this would have happened in the first place.

Physical books don't have DRM - so why should their digital equivalents?

Publishers who want to stay in business are going to have to start selling books without digital rights management, says science fiction author Charlie Stross. DRM locks customers into individual ebookstores and devices, which is the primary way that Amazon perpetuates its stranglehold on this market.

For AMZN, the big six insistence on DRM on ebooks was a windfall: it made the huge investment in the Kindle platform worthwhile, and by 2010 Amazon had come close to an 85% market share in the ebook sector (which was growing at a dizzying compound rate of 100-200% per annum, albeit from a small base). And now we get to 2012, and ebooks are likely to hit 40% of total publishing sales by the end of this year, and are on the way to 60% within five years (per Tim Hely Hutchinson, CEO of Hachette UK). In five years, we've gone from <1% to >40%. That's disruption for you!

As an author, it's theoretically in Stross's interest to maintain the DRM business as usual. But he argues, and I think recent history is on his side, that "the real driver for piracy is the lack of convenient access to desirable content at a competitive price."

As one of only two publishers who have decided not to settle with the DOJ in its case against them (the other is Penguin), Macmillan is now in a unique position: It's a large, profitable company that is willing to experiment, but also inherently conservative precisely because of its success.

I single out Macmillan because -- full disclosure -- I collaborated on new projects with the then-head of Macmillan US when I was an editor at Scientific American. It strikes me as exactly the sort of organization that is teetering on the edge of being the first do do the radical thing that's required to save itself -- namely, eliminate DRM from its ebooks and therefore destroy the Monopsony that Amazon will otherwise cement.

When I wrote last week that I didn't think it particularly mattered whether or not Amazon became an e-book monopoly, because straight text is the most platform-independent kind of content in existence, I forgot that we still live in a world in which books purchased from Amazon can only be read on Amazon's devices and apps.

It's abundantly clear that publishers that survive in an Amazon world will be those who disrupt Amazon itself. If Amazon's aim is to "cut out the middleman" then the next logical step is for publishers to cut out the middleman that is Amazon.

Stross lays it out in stark terms:

And so [publishers] will deep-six their existing commitment to DRM and use the terms of the DoJ-imposed settlement to wiggle out of the most-favoured-nation terms imposed by Amazon, in order to sell their wares as widely as possible.

If they don't, they're doomed.

There is one other outcome that is possible, and unfortunately for existing publishers, I think it's the most likely: New publishing companies will spring up that are willing to publish books sans DRM. This will lead to (some) piracy but will also return to these companies the power to price their wares as they see fit. These companies will also, incidentally, not be saddled by the legacy costs of existing publishers. And in this way companies that have existed for centuries will be radically transformed -- or else cease to exist.

"Muhahahaha!" says Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (Photo by Doc Searls)

The Department of Justice is suing Apple and book publishers for "collusion" on book prices, and the result, as Tim Carmody thoughtfully articulates at Wired, is that everything Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has built over the past decade, his entire e-publishing empire, is now sanctified at the level of Federal law. On the other hand, observes Mathew Ingram in an equally thoughtful post at GigaOm, the "agency" pricing model that publishers and Apple got in trouble for might have been a barrier to innovation.

Watching from what feels like the nosebleed seats, I have to say that I find this entire battle baffling. Because I don't think Amazon really matters all that much in the long run.

Right now the Kindle is a very popular reading device. But so what? It's just a commodity e-ink screen fused to Amazon's purchasing system. Granted, Apple's success with an identical model has proved that the level of convenience it affords is almost unstoppable. For now.

In the long run, e-readers are nothing special -- the very definition of commodity hardware. Given the trajectory of pricing for Kindle hardware, Amazon's going to be giving them away as loss leaders within a few years.

Meanwhile, tablets continue to proliferate. And with the iPad 3, they finally have the resolution to match an e-ink display. Huzzah! Further developments in screen resolution are superfluous, given the visual acuity of H. sapiens. Now we simply wait for this technology to become cheap and ubiquitous.

The people who seem to care most deeply about the Amazon vs. Apple dustup are publishers, because the model they are being penalized for adopting helps them make more money. But really, who cares? Based on the experiences of many of my writer friends, publishers have already cut back on the services to writers that used to make them worthwhile -- attentive editors, marketing campaigns, etc.

For the most part, the publishing industry is already, from the perspective of the content maker, a ghost ship. Amazon's impending monopoly may look like an event horizon beyond which nothing good can exist, but that kind of doomsaying is unimaginative.

Books are just text. There is nothing more readily transmissible, more endlessly compatible with device types, screen sizes, etc. There will be open and closed platforms, and new ways to market and sell books -- many of them much more direct than the old ways.

These efficiencies will probably drive down the prices of books, to a point. But it's hard to imagine that creating a more liquid market for books by clearing out the entrenched players -- by which I mean publishers -- is ultimately such a terrible thing for authors and readers.