And there will be; it's just that it might be a different population of authors than we have today, e.g., Charlie Stross might not be among them.
As another poster pointed out upthread, there will always be plenty of people who will write even if they get paid very poorly. Charlie Stross might not be one of them; if the pay he can get from writing goes down enough, he might, as he says in his article, have to stop writing and find another job that pays more. But there will be plenty of authors who will continue to write even under Amazon's self-publishing terms.
That's just baseless scaremongering. If people value Stross' work enough, they will pay. Amazon can not become a monopoly, there are always other ways (like printed books, buying directly from the author, whatever).
I don't think it would be in Amazon's interest to encourage alternate channels by driving quality authors away.
They probably also can not just sell any crap that calls itself a book, so they need good authors (assuming books are even significant revenue for them anyway).
I didn't say this will happen, nor did I say it would necessarily be a good thing if it happened. I just said it might happen. Stross himself appears to agree that it might; see below.
> If people value Stross' work enough, they will pay.
And if they don't, they won't. More precisely, the more it costs to get Stross' work, the fewer people are likely to pay. Will there be enough at a higher cost (such as buying printed books or buying direct from the author) for Stross to make a living at it? Stross himself didn't seem too hopeful in his article; if you think otherwise, perhaps you should tell him, not me.
> I don't think it would be in Amazon's interest to encourage alternate channels by driving quality authors away.
I don't think Amazon cares about quality authors as such; I think they care about selling what the public has shown, by its buying choices, that it wants to buy. If the public wants to buy the work of quality authors, Amazon will sell it--and try to undercut everyone else's price. If the public wants trash, Amazon will sell that--and try to undercut everyone else's price.
> They probably also can not just sell any crap that calls itself a book, so they need good authors
Maybe, maybe not. See above. It's not Amazon that's ultimately deciding this; it's us, the readers.
> (assuming books are even significant revenue for them anyway).
I don't know about revenue, but I think it's quite possible that books, or at least e-books, might be a significant portion of their profits. They have distribution costs down extremely low for anything digital, and the prices in the Kindle store indicate to me that there could be quite a bit of margin there.
