That is absolutely true. Distribution is by far not the only important factor to consider. It's just that distribution so totally dominated everything for over a century that its commoditization radically changes everything. Most companies offered other services (marketing, logistics, team management, etc) and made some money on them but distribution was an order of magnitude more important and where they made their real money. Now with distribution being essentially solved, those other things become much more important.... but those things can also be more easily and efficiently solved by independent contractors and people not hampered by the giant distribution networks and existing distribution agreements that the big publishers are saddled with. Those things were absolute GOLD for a century. Now they are a noose. What interests me now is the value of aggregation. It was mostly taken for granted when distribution was a much larger problem, but now aggregating things together and making it easier for customers to find things is far more important. When you've got millions of products available to you, learning about the products you are interested in and being able to find them all in one place becomes more important. It's a far easier (in terms of material cost, not intellectual challenge) problem to solve than distribution, though. So these companies are really going to have to radically shrink their profit margins in any case.... and modern businesses can't even deal well with slowing growth, let alone actual shrinking...