Diamond Dogs

It 's starting to get all over the Net ; Diamond raises its order minimums.

http://comicsworthreading.com/2009/01/16/diamond-raises-order-minimums/

Diamond has a quasi-monopole over comics distribution which means two things mostly.
Independents comic publisher will either disappear from diamond's catalog and or they'll stay but probably raise their price in order to match the new benchmark.
A little math is done there on this blog.
http://blog.comichron.com/2009/01/order-cutoffs-and-charts.html

That's a sad news because indies will have to raise their price and try to go for quick and cheap plot in order to sell asap and amap.
Hopefully this may be the rise of a secondary distributing market or maybe make the wave of digital comics grow stronger and bigger... We will see.