What if Amazon ruled publishing,

The Atlantic asks. Functionally, I think they’d publish almost everything that meets a minimum set of formatting guidelines. The tiers would go like this, I think:

The Morlocks
Your cousin has a book of poetry, a guy whose blog you read wrote a YA novel. No advances, no promotion, no editing, Kindle sales, physical copies printed on demand. But: why wouldn’t Amazon “publish” them? There’s food at the bottom of the pond, ask a catfish.

The Mid-List
Authors previously published through the old model, promising newcomers. No advances, targeted promotion within Amazon.com (which is where people who buy books are looking for books anyway), editing, physical copies printed on demand. In the past, you could maybe make a living at this tier just writing and touring books. Now you probably can’t.

Stars
Steven King, Tim Ferriss. Strawberries dipped in caviar, big advances, broad promotion, favorite editors hired by Amazon, big piles of printed books waiting to ship.

The Atlantic piece ends:

When one company holds the keys to the kingdom for what content consumers can see on its device, it has a lot of power as to what kind of information reaches people. [...] If Amazon consolidates its power in the publishing industry, what would become of a book criticizing Amazon? The value of the publishing industry is at least in part in the competition among ouses, which means that if one place passes over a manuscript, someone else might see value in it. As Amazon’s power grows, we better hope that it doesn’t become the only show in town.

I think Amazon would publish a book criticizing Amazon because they’d carry one, viz. their Content Guidelines. Which doesn’t distinguish between publishers and vendors – much like Amazon itself. And if they were to get too restrictive on content, an opportunity for disruption would arise, probably in the form of books-as-apps vs. the sale of files that require a reader. It’s not like you need to buy a printing press.