Following this week’s announcement that Amazon had acquired Lexcycle, makers of the Stanza e-reader app, industry watchers have weighed in with their perspectives. Here are three good commentaries on what the acquisition means for publishing:

Kassia Krozser remarks that the Lexcycle acquisition is not “the end of the world as we know it,” but neither is it great news for publishers and readers.

Consumers are slowly being locked into a single vendor. Publishers are being backed into Amazon’s corner. Yet, yet, yet, I ask again: where are the publishing initiatives, the fresh thinking, to protect the free market?

BookNet Canada offers a Canadian perspective on the deal and suggest three actions publishers can take to keep Amazon from a market stranglehold.

This market is developing at a fevered rate. If you want to help shape the forces that are going to in turn, influence the way you create, sell and acquire books in the future, then now is the time.

Mike Shatzkin believes the real issues brought to light by the deal are pricing and making books discoverable by readers. He calls for the big publishers to come together to develop an online bookstore of their own.

The current effort by several general trade publishers to drive traffic to their own house-branded web sites is misguided and doomed. But Amazon (and Shelfari, GoodReads, LibraryThing, and our new entrant, Filedby.com) have demonstrated that sites with information across the trade book spectrum have real consumer appeal.

Amazon has extended the reaches of its empire once again.

Late yesterday afternoon, news broke that Amazon had acquired Lexcycle, makers of Stanza, a popular e-reader application for the iPhone. Within minutes of the announcement being picked up in the New York Times, the Twittersphere was buzzing with speculation.

So far, what’s known is that Amazon has acquired Lexcycle. And … well, that’s all that’s known for sure right now. No word on the purchase price. More importantly, there remain a lot of unanswered questions as to what this acquisition will mean for the emerging e-book market.

Stanza is one of the most popular e-reader applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. With a user base of more than 1.3 million, the app outstrips Amazon’s Kindle in market penetration. Last month, Amazon launched a Kindle app for the iPhone, allowing Kindle owners to also read books on their mobile device. However, like the Kindle itself, the app was only available in the United States. Now, with the acquisition of Stanza, Amazon has instant access to a worldwide mobile user base.

The sticky question is what Amazon will do with the Stanza software. To date, Stanza has offered support for open e-book formats. The application reads ePub files (the book format that the publishing industry has been to trying to standardize around) and files not protected with DRM technology.

Amazon, on the other hand, has been building a supply chain around its own proprietary Kindle format. Kindle books can only be read on a Kindle device or with the iPhone Kindle app. So it seems unlikely Amazon will allow Stanza’s continued support of open formats.

Here’s a summary of some of the commentary now circulating:

• Michael Cairns points out that now is the time for the publishing industry to get behind a common e-book standard. If publishers don’t act now while the e-book market is still in its infancy, they will become increasingly powerless against retail behemoths like Amazon.
• Mike Cane provides some compelling analysis on why the acquisition is bad, bad news for the industry.
• Paul Biba shares some thoughts on the acquisition’s negative implications for the “little guy.”
• Karen Templar summarizes some of the big questions the industry now faces.

E-books are gaining in popularity, but there are still some issues that hold them back from widespread pick-up. File format wars are one of them.

If you want to read an e-book, you first have to decide which reading device you’ll commit to: your PC, a Kindle, your iPhone, a Sony Reader? Books available for one device are not always available on another, and if you want to switch devices at a later date you may lose all your books.

As a publisher, you must decide which e-book formats you should invest money in producing: one, some, all? Which has the bigger audience? Who will be around for the long-term?

In the 1990s, the dizzying array of e-book formats confused the market and hobbled the industry’s success. Today, to avoid a repeat of history, a consortium of publishers, booksellers, authors, and software publishers are calling for the book industry to rally around a single file format. That rally point is ePub, a free and open digital book format based on XHTML. “Open” means the files are not protected with DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology, and can be freely read by any hardware or software with ePub capability.

A single unlocked file format makes life easier for everyone. With an ePub standard in place, you (as the publisher) only need to create a single digital version of your e-books, saving you time, money, and headaches. Readers can be assured of having access to all the e-books they want on whatever device they choose, and can even switch between different devices without losing access to their library.

The ePub format, launched in late 2007, is still relatively new but gaining good momentum. Though there’s still a long way to go yet, some believe that 2009 will be the year ePub truly becomes the industry standard.

The ePub Blog is a good resource for more information. It includes a list of devices that can read ePub files, as well as places you can download ePub books.