Now take that and move that to Amazon's domain. The currently offer insanely low prices. Selling each book with a 30% to apple can make their profit margin zero or less.
There's a new ecosystem waiting to be born here.
My read is that Apple is looking ahead at a future full of small/startup ebook publishers.
At the local iPhone dev meetup, I met this college kid with a modest little Catholic prayers and affirmations app. It's basically the electronic equivalent of a pamphlet. He doesn't put any effort into marketing it. It makes $150/month. Granted, that's a small amount, but a very tiny amount of investment went into that small return. With a little effort, I bet there's a lot of independent authors who could make a living publishing this way, and that the big players in ebooks and publishing are actually in the way of this ecosystem coming into being.