Your analysis is intriguing, but I'm not entirely convinced by a couple of things:

1. Amazon's Alexa traffica and rankings (even assuming Alexa tells the whole story) when looked at over the past five years seem to show that over the past couple years Amazon jumped up from the 18-23 range to nearly 10 and then came back down. It doesn't look like a long-term decline (at least not yet).

Amazon.com sells many different kinds of products. Exactly which products led to the decline that you found?

Its also difficult to extrapolate Amazon's numbers to all online booksellers. Couldn't Amazon's decline be due to other online booksellers gaining market share? Where are the traffic numbers for ALL online booksellers headed?

2. I'm no expert on ebook standards, but I do have to challenge your assertion that there are open standards available and ready to use, at least in terms of what is acceptable in today's marketplace. I looked at the Open Reader site you linked to, and found that the standard isn't complete, and there are neither readers nor authoring software available for this format.

Is there some open format that can actually be used? Did I miss some software package that uses open reader?

I currently publish both ebooks and printed books. I'm very open to creating works in another format. Point the way. Where can I find the software?

I do think that books will move in the direction you outline, and I agree that publishers could do more to make their works available, and in the process speed the development of ebooks.

But I do think that we need to be a little more realistic about where the book market is at the moment.
 

Kent,

Thanks for your thoughtful analysis. A few thoughts and comments:

- On Amazon: I think that their growth is in trouble as so much of it is contingent on copyrighted content in traditional formats. It's a fairly healthy economy and they didn't get much of a significant bump from holiday sales - and then tanked heavily afterwards. You may be right about this not being a long term trend, but I am challenged to think why it would go up at this point on the back of book sales alone.

RE other booksellers, I did to an analysis of some of the other major publishers' sites, they're flatlining. eBooks.com is healthy enough but also not growing significantly - actually a slight downtrend overall.

In addition to OpenReader there is also the standards being pushed by the IDPF. There are also readers available for OpenReader - see OSoft's open source ThoutReader for an example.

I hear you about being "realistic" about the book market, which is why I took the "promises, promises" approach to this article. Yet at the end of the day, with so many changes to the publishing and the ultra-conservative moves of book publishers towards meeting those changes, it appears that perhaps the book industry itself is failing to be realistic about its prospects.

Thanks again for your thoughtful comments, looking forward to this article stimulating further discussion.

All the best,
John Blossom