There’s a lot of choice in today’s publishing market. From imprints to indie publishing to hard cover books to ebooks, authors have alternatives that weren`t possible even 10 years ago. But with all this choice, comes some confusion and questions.

In the past, I went through a “publishing” firm to get my indie books (4) printed and onto the market. In the past year, I switched to a commercial (book) printer and did my own publishing and marketing, including getting active on social media. Along with this, of course, I wanted to get my work into ebook form as well. I thought this would be fairly straight forward: get them into a proper format, and get accepted on all the various sites that vend ebooks.

Then came the shock.

The largest and most well-known ebook vendor (as far as I know) is Amazon-Kindle, and I discovered if you place your ebooks with them, you cannot place your ebooks with any other vendor in the world. In fact, it seems you can’t even sell them yourselves. I mean, talk about ‘Thou shall have no other gods before me!’

Has anyone got any comments on this? In particularly, how is Amazon able to get away with this? Isn’t it the type of thing Microsoft was always getting into trouble with when it tried to bully all other competition out of their market? Let me know what you think.