When I listen to friends celebrate the democratic properties of digital space, I sometimes cannot help but remember that old adage, "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it." You have probably heard some variation of it. Well...in 1948 the Supreme Court made a decision, United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., that held movie studios could not both own movie production and movie theaters. A famous antitrust case addressing the practice of vertical integration, it proved the death knell of the "studio system."

The facts of the case are pretty straightforward: Major film studios had writers, directors, producers, and actors "under contract." They owned film processing laboratories; these labs exclusively created prints of their movies, and they owned the subsequent distribution companies that moved these prints to theaters. Finally, the studios also owned the theaters where their motion pictures were shown. Of course, as you can imagine, theater chains only showed films produced by the studios that owned them. By 1945, studios owned or had stakes in 17% of the theaters in the country; these theaters accounted for 45% of film-rental revenue.

The studios' integrated ownership of production, distribution, and exhibition was smothering competition and keeping prices artifically high.

Two recent tremors in e-publishing have reminded me of the historic Paramount Decision.

On 16.October the New York Times published an article, "Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal," detailing, as you might guess, Amazon's entry into publishing. With its Kindle a success and with the recent introduction of Kindle Fire, Amazon is now eeking into competition with its suppliers. "Publishers say Amazon is aggressively wooing some of their top authors," writes David Streitfeld, "And the company is gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide."

To detail one response to this, Streitfeld tells the experiences of an author named Kiana Davenport. Davenport was given a $20,000 advance from Penguin for a book, but when she took "several award-winning short stories she had written 20 years ago and [self-] packaged them in an e-book, 'Cannibal Nights,' available on Amazon," she was accused of breaking a non-compete clause in her contract. After Davenport refused to take down "Cannibal Nights" and remove all mentions of it from the web, Penguin cancelled her contract.

It would appear that Amazon, by venturing into publishing, is beginning a process of vertical integration similar to the movie studios of yore. In fact, according to the article, "Jeffrey P. Bezos, the company’s chief executive, referred several times to Kindle as 'an end-to-end service,' conjuring up a world in which Amazon develops, promotes and delivers the product."

Alone, perhaps, one might not find this aticle all that alarming. After all, though Amazon may sign authors, its kindle service is still democratic inasmuch as it will also publish works from other publishers and those works will be available to other retail venues, right?

Perhaps.

Another Times article published on 18.October, 2011 muddies the water. Titled, "In a Battle of the E-Readers, Booksellers Spurn Superheroes," this article details how, in order to make "Kindle Fire tablet as appealing as possible," Amazon has "negotiated a deal with DC Comics for the exclusive digital rights to a hundred popular graphic novels." Because of this deal, "Barnes & Noble, with a tablet of its own to nurture...removed all the copies of the physical volumes from its 1,300 stores, saying it would not carry any book if it were denied the right to sell the digital version." In fact, "Books-a-Million, the third-largest bookseller with 231 stores, followed suit last week, making the same argument."

Amazon's attempts to compete with both publishing houses and bookstores via its Kindle raises many questions about the future of digital publishing. Will we have equal access to books on our iPads, Kindles, etc., or will we have various tablet technologies offering competing, exclusively licensed and/or produced content? Is this a new form of digital vertical integration?

I suppose we will find out. After all, as much as it is claimed that "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it," it has also been observed that "The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed."