[Prestidigitweeze]

Increasingly, we rely on huge booksellers for independent content, telling ourselves that unwanted books are weeded out by customers' purchasing decisions rather than perfectly good books being excluded by theirs. The problem seems twofold: their monopolization of content distribution and exposure and our laziness in seeking out more obscure content.

One issue might be that we're too comfortable with stores and search engines being one and the same. We want to find, purchase and download ebooks as easily as possible, but we still don't have an inclusive, well-organized and efficient shopping search engine just for ebooks. Yes, there are small-scale sites that attempt sprawling metasearches, but they tend to become unwieldy and obscure. There's nothing on the level of, say, a Google shopping engine tailored specifically to books (since, unfortunately, Google opted to become yet another vendor and even their ebook store is terribly organized: search for an obscure author with a common name and you'll see what I mean).

For customers not to become dependent on specific vendors for content, they need a comparison-shopping engine that can be set by format and which doesn't simply apply to a few sites of like description, and which can separate groups of results under title and author names. I'd love it if a less-common search engine unburdened by ads and tracking (like ixquick) were the first to provide that service with an ease that rivaled Amazon's.

Since ebooks have become popular enough to deserve their own (non-exclusive) pages on major search engines, it might be time to stop seeing Amazon as more attractive than other booksellers simply because their searches and purchasing process are easier. Then monopolies might monopolize less and diverse content become more available to everyone -- even us at our laziest.

[Edit: My use of the word we is intended not to refer to Mobile Read members but rather all consumers who might buy ebooks. Yes, of course our members tend to be aware of better options (or become more aware over time).]