Amazon Buy Stanza: the birth of an E-book market monopoly??

There has been a lot of noise about Amazons purchase of Stanza, the famous E-book reader application for Windows, Mac and iPhone.

To clarify the situation for those of you that don't follow the ebook market, there are currently a few major players: Fictionwise, Amazon with it's kindle and Mobipocket which runs on many PDAs and smartphones (but not the iPhone) and which is also owned by Amazon. the fourth sizeable player was Stanza, with it's excellent application supporting Mobipocket, Fictiowise and ePub formated eBooks, as well as allowing conversion of some books to Amazon's kindle. The success of Stanza clearly overshadowed the official amazon reader for the iPhone, which was not very advanced.

The problem in my opinion is that now Amazon controls most of the major eBook players both in the content and application space!

On the content field they have Amazon (of course), Mobipocket and Stanza. the only major player remaining is Fictiowise and a few "specialty" eBook providers like Baen who specializes in Sci-Fi.

On the application space they have the Kindle reader, the Mobipocket reader and now stanza. The only remaining competition is Adobe Reader and the Open source FBreader and Plucker (which should work on, the Palm Pré in emulation mode)

Why is this bad? because we might end up with a virtual monopoly, a situation where you can't really distribute an eBook if you are not supported by Amazon, and where you can't really offer eBooks on a device if Amazon refuses to support you. This situation is very problematic in any market or industry because it leads to stagnation, as it is not in the interest of the dominant monopoly to "rock the boat" with new ideas or innovation, and in the eBook market (as well as in other creative markets) we NEED innovation.

What does this means for the eBook consumer? That the pace of innovation may slow down, especially on non mainstream platforms. I expect that in the medium term only specialized device such as the kindle or very successful platforms like the iPhone will be supported with professional content, the other having to make do with open source readers and free content. On the flip side we may finally have only one consolidated library for all our commercial content.

For the writer the situation is not so clear. As long as Stanza and the kindle continue supports open formats it will probably still be possible to distribute your content from your own site as long as you don't want to use DRM. If you wish to be distributed by major sites you choices have been reduced dramatically: it is either a site owned by Amazon or Fictionwise, and that's pretty much it. If you get rejected by Amazon your prospect are not bright.

What I do hope is that this will not reduce the amount of eBook content that is mode available, as this would be a loss for both consumers and writers.

UPDATE: it looks like I am not the only one worried about this!