Some people view ebooks as just a fad, something that’s popular today but gone tomorrow. I think they’re wrong. There are signs everywhere that ebooks are the future of the way we consume all kinds of literature.

Thus I composed this short list of the top 5 signs that signal ebooks are definitely getting more "mainstream" every day. I didn’t rank these in order of importance because I think they are all important in different ways.

1. Release of the Kindle 2: Despite my criticism, I don’t hate Amazon and I don’t even hate the Kindle, I just hate the DRM they have in place that let’s users have access to content they buy, but not actually own it. But I have to give Amazon credit, they have really pushed ebooks into the public eye.

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In a move that signals the continuing growth of the self-publishing arena, the first-ever self-publishing book expo has been announced:

Publishing veterans Diane Mancher and Karen Mender are launching Self-Publishing Book Expo, an event that will focus on self-published books and the companies that produce them. SPBE will offer attending authors a place to exhibit and sell their books to the general public–and agents and publishers–as well as offering representatives from self-publishing companies to showcase their services. The event is slated for November.

You can read the the entire article from Publishers Weekly. And you can visit the book expo website here.

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The news about Amazon’s ‘glitch’ that has resulted in thousands of titles being removed from its ranking system has really spread around the internet like wildfire.

For those of you unfamiliar with the story, thousands of titles, dealing mostly with gay and lesbian themes, were removed from Amazon’s ranking system. This basically means none of those titles will show up on bestseller lists, "Amazon Recommends" lists, and pretty much everything else. In other words, you won’t find those titles unless you specifically search for them.

Amazon says it’s nothing more than a glitch that they are working to fix. Many on the intertubes, however, are pretty sure it’s a conspiracy by Amazon to censor what we read.

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I freely admit that I like Amazon.com. I have ordered a lot of stuff from them (mostly books) over the years with minimal fuss and it’s always such a joy to see that Amazon package sitting on my front porch waiting for me when I get home.

I’m not saying Amazon is perfect, no large corporation is. But I can easily say I have been a satisfied customer and confident enough in the company to place their ads on this blog.

Ironically, the problem I have with Amazon is the one area of book publishing,distribution and consumption I’m interested in most – that is, ebooks. While I don’t doubt that the Kindle has thrown ebooks into the mainstream in a big way, I think Amazon is making some very fatal mistakes that can easily spell doom for Amazon and for ebooks.

Kindle DRM means you "access" books, don’t really "own" them

My biggest fear has come true. In this disturbing post yesterday over at Teleread, a Kindle customer, Michael, relates how he was banned from Amazon and blocked from the ebooks he legally purchased on the site.

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I’m pretty convinced that J.K. Rowling does not read this blog, because if she did, she would have read this earlier post about her problem with ebook piracy. Yet Rowling has still refused to release her popular Harry Potter books into ebook format, creating a ripe environment for unscrupulous pirates to post digital copies of her novels online.

Today I came across this article from the Times Online, which says that her novels, along with other popular books, have shown up on the popular site Scribd.

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The online-only paper Christian Science Monitor came out with this interesting article, calling the Amazon Kindle "a Trojan horse". I first read about the article from this post by my good, ebook-loving friends over at Teleread.

After reading the article, and then re-reading it a few times, this excerpt really stuck out:

…Kindle is the kind of technology that challenges media freedom and restricts media pluralism. It exacerbates what historian William Leach calls "the landscape of the temporary": a hyper mobile and rootless society that prefers access to ownership. Such a society is vulnerable to the dangers of selective censorship and control.

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The largest retail bookseller in the US acquired Fictionwise, the largest indie outlet for ebooks, this according to this article at Publishers Weekly. This move effectively throws B&N into the ebook game and probably into direct competition with Amazon and its Kindle 2.

However, beyond the news of this transaction is both praise and criticism. Critics say that they admired Fictionwise for being an independent force in ebook retailing. According to one post on the Teleread blog, Fictionwise was also admired for being more willing to work with small publishers:

Not everyone sees full positives here. "Fictionwise was the big independent in the industry, and also the company most willing to work with small publishers and non-DRM," Rob Preece of BooksForABuck.com, a small e-publisher, said in a TeleRead comment. "I’m sorry to see them go as an independent force, and not especially happy that BN made the purchase as they haven’t traditionally been especially friendly to small publishing.

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Online retailer Amazon.com has decided to let authors decide if they want the text-to-speech feature to be a part of their ebooks on Amazon’s new Kindle 2. This comes after the Authors Guild raised a ruckus and even threatened legal action, arguing that the text-to-speech feature infringed on the rights of audiobooks.

According to this article from Yahoo!, Amazon is already working on the changes:

Amazon said it is making modifications to allow those holding rights to written works to decide on a title-by-title basis whether to allow Kindle 2 devices to read passages aloud using text recognition software.

This comes after whining from the Authors Guild:

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With all this talk of doom and gloom surrounding the economy nowadays, it’s always nice to read some good news for a change – especially if that good news is in the publishing industry.

According to this Publishers Weekly article, Harlequin did have a pretty good year:

Harlequin was a bright spot for parent company Torstar in 2008. Revenue at the romance publisher rose 2.2%, to C$472.9 million ($379 million), while operating profit increased 11.2% to C$67.4 million. Sales in the company’s North American retail and Overseas segments were up in the year, offsetting declines in the North American direct-to-consumer segment. Harlequin also had a slight benefit from the strengthening of the U.S. dollar.

The article also points to strong ebook sales as well:

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When I wrote this post about the new and improved Kindle 2, I hardly gave much thought about its text-to-speech functionality, other than noting that the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) would probably applaud the feature.

However, I failed to see this from the point of view of the Authors Guild, who claims that the Kindle 2 is infringing on the copyright protection of audiobooks. Then I read this article from Yahoo!:

The challenge revolves around audiobooks, which are treated separately from printed material from a copyright standpoint. A retailer can’t record a copy of a book on a CD and sell it or bundle it along with a novel without paying a separate fee, just as buying a copy of an audiobook doesn’t entitle you to a free copy of the printed version.

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