I really think it’s going to happen. After Sony ditched its proprietary format in favor of the cross platform EPUB, it seems possible that eBook and eBook Reader Retailers might stop trying to control their products and start selling them untethered. Just sell the eBook Reader and allow consumers to decide what and where they’ll get their reading material. The format disunity is just slowing down the eBook Revolution, yah?

One look at this excellent article by Lauren Walter at the Examiner.com, and you’ll see that the market is slowly moving toward universality with their formats. A year ago, there must have been twenty different eBook file formats in play, and other than .TXT, few of them worked on the different devices.

Here’s an interesting (if a trifle inflated) article at the guardian.co.uk about Dan Brown’s Davinci Code sequel The Lost Symbol arriving in time to SAVE the publishing industry.

It more reasonably goes on to talk about the book’s positive impact on the burgeoning eBook marketplace.

That’s the meat of the story for me since it could be argued that the imperiled traditional publishers got themselves into trouble by putting all of their focus on publishing only bestsellers by authors like DAN BROWN, STEPHEN KING or J. K. ROWLING, etc.

They further narrowed their scope with attempts to capitalize on each bestseller’s success by releasing similar books by lesser authors. In the process, the publishers lost their ability to adapt and the traditional book market stagnated.

If they had focused on longevity instead of quarterly profits, these publishers would have been grooming new writers, thereby opening the market to varied tastes in author, genre, subject matter, etc.