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I stopped reading at about page 2 1/2, so I hope I'm not repeating what everyone after that said...
When I first started buying ebooks (2003/2004?), a couple of the big publishers had the ability to buy books from their own sites. With the exception of S&S, none of them offered any kind of discounting.
For most ebooks, I shopped (then) at Fictionwise. Otherwise, I happily bought from S&S in the format of my (then) choice - PDB. Then they decided to stop offering PDB and I had 15 days to redownload everything and would no longer have access to my bookshelf. Luckily, the PDB ebooks (now eReader, originally Peanut Press, then Palm Digital Media) are tied to my credit card number, which I still happen to remember. Oh, and S&S started selling PDB again about a year later, but didn't reinstate any bookshelves for those of us that bought them before.
Then I got notices that Publisher B wasn't going to sell ebooks on their site anymore. Then Publisher C. Luckily, I hadn't invested in books there. But those people all lost access to their bookshelves.
I now know about Alf and his happy tools. So it's less critical to me than it used to be. But my fear about publisher sites is that they really haven't seemed all that interested in the customer. (Hasn't that really been the complaint in a lot of this, that they don't see the "reader" as their main customers?) How long will they decide to offer ebooks?
I've got a Sony reader, so I've got ebooks at Fictionwise, at Kobo, at B&N, and at Sony. Also at Smashbooks and a couple other independents that offer backlist republished books. So I don't really mind site-hopping to get to my books. But I really don't trust the big publishers (yet) to treat me like a customer.
The DRM-free stuff is a huge plus for me. And with Dropbox and other cloud services, I'm a lot more comfortable that my backups will still be around when I finally get around to reading the ebooks I bought 10 years ago, let alone this year.
But I still like feeling somewhat comfortable that my books are also on those retailers bookshelves, in case of the worst kind of computer catastrophe.
(Having said all that, I feel sadly confident that I'll be receiving that email from Fictionwise in the next year or so saying they're closing up and I need to make sure I have good copies, or too bad - but I've got books there I bought in my earliest days that aren't even offered there for sale any more that I can still re-download. So I'm not sorry they used to be my favorite place).
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