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That was why I looked at the 400 most popular SF ebooks, rather than a random group of authors that I like. I wanted to see how many authors that people are reading were in just one venue. Now, it could just be that there were an extraordinary number of PD books in SF, but I saw a lot of Conan, Solomon Kane (both by Howard) and Oz books. Also, it seemed to me that most of the books were either by a small group of authors (Jim Butcher, Terry Brooks, Laurell Hamilton, Stephen King, Rachael Caine to name a few), i.e. popular authors who have bought into the ebook concept, or were the romance novels masquerading as SF/occult (not surprising since this is a growing percentage of currently published SF).
Obviously, Amazon's numbers are bigger and Amazon seems to be making a concerned effort to make sure that if a book is available in ebook format, it's available from them for the Kindle. I wish that Sony was putting the same sort of effort into it, or at least coming up with an alternate method for providing content. On the other hand, I think that it's pretty likely that within a two to five year space, technology will have advanced enough that both readers will be obsolete and some sort of standard format will emerge. The only question in my mind is will there be a method for moving content onto the new format. I think that as the downloadable music wars wind down and music continues down the path of non DRM, how Apple and iTunes handles the situation will provide template for how the question of proprietary formats will be handled. If Apple provides a way for customers to un-DRM their music, pretty much all vendors will have to follow suit in ebooks as well as music.
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