TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Publishers are (rightly) running scared because of Amazon:

“Everyone’s afraid of Amazon,” said Richard Curtis, a longtime agent who is also an e-book publisher. “If you’re a bookstore, Amazon has been in competition with you for some time. If you’re a publisher, one day you wake up and Amazon is competing with you too. And if you’re an agent, Amazon may be stealing your lunch because it is offering authors the opportunity to publish directly and cut you out.

“It’s an old strategy: divide and conquer,” Mr. Curtis said.

It’s not surprising (or interesting) that the publishing industry is being disrupted by Amazon. That’s a result of technological change, and if it wasn’t Amazon, it would have been someone else. Agents and publishers depended on exclusivity—to get published, you had to know the right people—and that is no longer the case with the web.

But what is interesting is that Amazon is now an end-to-end provider of books and other written pieces. They make deals with writers directly (or allow them to sell their work on the Amazon store), sell directly to readers, and sell the device customers read on. Amazon is setting up a feedback loop where writers are pressured to sell their books to Amazon because so many people use it, readers are pressured to use it because all they can read on their Kindles are Kindle books, and soon, because Amazon will have exclusive access to certain books.

Long-term, I don’t think that’s going to last. If digital books are going to become the main way that we read, we will need a way to, one, read from a multitude of sources and two, more importantly, ensure that our purchased books will continue to be usable in the future.