Fast Company has a long article on Amazon, distribution, and the future of publishing.

Jeff Bezos is trying to do to book publishers what Steve Jobs of Apple did to the music industry. With its iPod and iTunes Store, Apple carved out a largely virgin market so fast that it was able to wrest control of the digital-music distribution system and thus dictate what the record labels could do. With Amazon jamming (its latest earnings are sky-high even as other online retailers are in a state of malaise), Bezos may sense similar opportunity, a moment when he, in true Jobs-like fashion, could colonize this growing niche for the Amazon ecosystem.