Any decent literary agent is going to know to explicitly retain and deny publishers e-book rights in order to protect the value of their client's IP. This price-fix was part of an understanding between content-producers and content-publishers to maintain reasonable price-parity with a lower overhead. Amazon just killed their golden goose...content producers don't need them as much as they need content producers.
This isn't going to as much create a monopoly as motivate publishing houses and IP-creators to kill the Kindle and Kindle-like products for lack of fresh content. Much like video-game consoles, e-book manufacturers sell units for a loss to recoup on sale of content for those units. Yes, the below-the-bar costs of that content is near-zero but you can't drive the sale of Kindles on content ranging from Treasure Island to Beowulf and other non-copyright material. Nobody's going to pay for content they can get from Project Gutenberg or pay for content that was previously-free. There's no way for someone like Amazon to keep giving away free content to drive unit sales to make that revenue up from the sale of fresh content when their access to fresh quality content is compromised.
If I write something and it's selling for $14 in paperback or $25 in hardcover, I might sell it myself through my own website as an e-book and take all the profits for myself or I might allow it to be sold on consignment at a price of my choosing but I'll be damned if I'm going to let Amazon undercut the value of my IP by discounting it on their site and pay me a pittance royalty. Mark my words that the counter-salvo will be the increase of royalty on e-content to artificially stabilize prices at near current levels...or the death of the e-book-reader.
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