As Amazon (s amzn) continues to tighten the screws on book publishers like Hachette — by making its books difficult to find, impossible to pre-order, and so on — the conventional wisdom seems to be that the company is an aggressive and possibly illegal monopoly aimed at killing publishers, and that its behavior is also bad for authors and probably consumers as well. The only problem with this view is that most of it, if not all of it, is completely wrong. What Amazon is doing is not only good for book-loving consumers but arguably good for authors as well — and even for some publishers (although not Hachette and its ilk).

Is Amazon a true monopoly? Not in any meaningful sense of the word — not any more than Walmart has a monopoly on sales of toothpaste. Yes, the electronic retailer has a large share of the ebook…