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I keep coming back to DRM as the main culprit. If publishers didn't insist on it, you'd have a collective of all other ebookstores (epub) vs. Amazon (mobi). You'd also get that dreadful Adobe Digital Editions out of the epub picture, which would be a major step in the right direction, for everything except library "borrowing" (which I'm still not sure is a viable concept for ebooks, from the publishers' point of view).
Publishers need to get over trying to control eyeballs. Yes, some people will read the books for free, but hey...some people have always read books without paying the publishers and authors! In fact, a heckuva lot of people have always done so! From lending/borrowing, to used bookstores, to yard sales...a lot of eyeballs read a lot of books without returning a penny to the authors and publishers. Yet when it comes to ebooks, publishers think that a free download is going to kill their business.
As for being assimilated and yielding to Amazon, it is not only painless, it's downright pleasurable! Maybe it's time to quit worrying about what they might do and look at what they do do and make the most of it. Yeah, maybe sometime in the future they'll try to make you eat broccoli, but that's when you take your stand and fight, not when things are going your way.
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