Economics of Kindle

Tyler links to this NYT article about the Kindle and how it's affecting the book industry. Do we really understand the economics of these kinds of "monopsony portals of purchase"? If electronic reading became popular, then who else would we buy our electronic books from but Amazon? And if they did like Apple with iTunes and tied the price directly to the Apple's proprietary MP3 technology that only let you play it on an iPod, then they'd be able to get the price down considerably since they, like Wal-mart, would have such tremendous bargaining power given their dominance as a portal of purchase.

One side note. My understanding of intellectual property is that the perpetual copyrights awarded to authors and musicians enables them to charge monopoly prices in perpetuity. That in and of itself is inefficient. I've always thought that if you have a monopoly on the selling side, another solution is to have a monopsonist on the buying side. I may be wrong on that, but since both parties are moving outcomes towards greater inefficiency, but in opposite directions, it'd seem that they'd be able to effectively push the outcome towards that efficient outcome. Probably not perfectly, but given the state of the technology and market structure as it is, it's got to be Pareto improving to have monopsonistic technologies like Amazon's Kindle or Apple's iTunes/iPod to combat the inefficiencies of the current IP regime.