Books are applications. Authors are the primary developers of these applications. In the past, these applications have run on the platform of Traditional Publishing, a platform comprised of Publishers, Wholesalers, Distributors and Retailers.
Those involved in Traditional Publishing have till now failed to recognize the platform-like nature of their industry. The arrival of ebooks, however, has made this platform-like nature explicit. The behemoths of the tech industry, which have a deep (and sometimes painfully acquired) understanding of the business opportunities and catastrophes caused by platform transitions, are now moving to exploit the platform transition (for books) currently underway.
Amazon: Initially joined the Traditional Publishing Platform as an online retailer. At some point in the development of the Kindle (and perhaps only with the development of the Kindle App) Amazon appears to have recognized the platform-like nature of the book business. Since that time they have been highly focussed on building the best platform to run this specific type of application (i.e. books).
There are two halves to the Amazon platform: a Reader Platform, and an Author Platform. The Reader Platform is comprised of the Kindle (ereader or app). The Author Platform is comprised of the Author Central site, Booksurge, and the DTP (publishing) service.
The Reader Platform is essentially a competitior with the Wholesalers, Distributors and Retailers of the Traditional Publishing Platform. The Author Platform is essentially a competitor with Publishers in the Traditional Publishing Platform. By analogy with the platforms of the software industry, Amazon's Author Platform is offering a Book Development Kit (BDK) to authors on their platform, much as the likes of Apple and Google offer a Software Development Kit (SDK) to the developers on their platforms.
Google: Has not participated in the Traditional Publishing Platform apart from a recent move into the Retailer segment through its ebookstore. But in its declared mission to organize all of the world's information, it has frequently been compelled to deal with the copyright owners of that information not yet in the public domain. Many such owners are Traditional Publishers.
Like Amazon, Google is developing both a Reader Platform and an Author Platform. However, both of Google's platforms are purely web-based. Although currently weaker than Amazon in copyrighted material, Google's digitization program has given it an unrivalled base-collection of public domain texts. At present, these are accessible through the Reader Platform. In time, these may prove to be a highly valuable part of Google's Author Platform.
Google's Author Platform differs from Amazon's in that it is not quite so tightly focussed on traditional books. In many ways it is simply an enhancement of the web-tools already offered by Google to web-developers. With the growing acceptance of epub (html5 inside) as the defacto standard for ebooks, Google's web-based tools will likely be a primary part of their Author Platfom. Its strength is in non-fiction, reference-type books, and this will become more apparent with the adoption of RDFa as the semantic enhancement standard in epub3.
Apple: Has participated in the Traditional Publishing Platform as a Distributor and Retailer. Although it has till now treated books as second-class citizens as compared to music, games, apps and movies, this seems likely to change.
The Apple Reader Platform is based on the ibookstore. There seems no reason that this should not eventually be to books what itunes is to music.
It is not clear whether Apple intends to establish an Author Platform. Although it makes available an app development kit for software developers, it has not done the equivalent for musicians or other rich-media creators. For authors, at present, Apple remains a channel rather than a platform.
Traditional Publishers: Most traditional publishers are Author Platforms. Many of them have an implicit (though very partial) understanding of this, and none have before faced the total disruption of a platform transition.
These companies have almost invariably responded to the transition in the following two ways:
1) Set up a Digital Department: Extremely dangerous. The people employed in these departments often have no deep understanding of either software or technical issues related to formats. Locked into channel-thinking, they concentrate on making a digital replica of the Traditional Publishing sales model. (And often out-source work to precisely those companies that have the potential to replace them as Author Platforms).
Another unfortunate side-effect of these departments is that Management believes the Digital Department is taking care of the 'digital side of things'. This obscures the uncomfortable truth that digital is pervasive, and that to compartmentalize it in this way might prove fatal to the company.
2)Establish an online sales channel: Unlikely to work for a general trade publisher, as its online store will appear to be a poor shadow of the Amazon/Goodle/etc stores. What is gained in customer connection will be lost in management time. A reasonable strategy, however, for specialist publishers, though this move places the publisher in direct competition with the Reader Platforms of Amazon/Google etc. It is often difficult to tell whether the publisher is making a sensible enhancement of the Traditional Publisher's Author Platform, or an ill-considered move to establish a platform in an area where it has no expertise.
So, what is a traditional publisher to do?
About particulars, I have not the faintest idea.
But as an author, I will develop my books on the best Author Platform available to me. I guess the question for traditional publishers must be: is that you?