Agreed, with a big caveat. The current ebook market discourages a competitive marketplace. Those who buy a Kindle are buying their books from Amazon. No exceptions. (Sure you can sell DRM-free Mobi and PDF files, but publishers aren't ready for that.) If you serve ePub readers, there is a little more freedom but there are also huge roadblocks. Licensing costs hurt the bookseller, especially if they don't know if they are going to sell enough to cover those costs. Are enough of the right publishers going to give you a license to sell their books? How do you distinguish yourself from other retailers in an industry that has minimal human interaction (if you're only online) or encourage customers to come to you when they it is faster to obtain an identical product from their desk chair (if you're brick and mortar)? To top it all off, the Internet seems to favor popularity. That makes the small vendor hard to find. It's product of how search engines and social networking sites work.

It can be done. But it sure is a lot more complex than it was in the bad old days. It depends upon a knowledge of the market that you're serving, the markets that you're buying from, and the technology to support it. Given that you can still walk into bookstores and never see a computer, how many of those small shops are going to be able to break into this brave new market?