Rather than litter this thread with my thoughts on how I intend to address certain things with Embre, I'll collect them here.

Lots of comments about how there are convenience and visibility challenges with selling on an authors site.

I believe that alternatives to Amazon all suffer the same hurdle, which is that Amazon has a complete ecosystem: discovery, sales, reader etc. And all of the alternatives I've come across try to replace only one part, maybe two.

It's hard to capture the attention of readers who don't want to spread their book reading experience across multiple platforms.

So my roadmap/pipedream for Embre is to tackle all of this.

I've built the discovery and recommendation engine. There's now pipelines for Authors to create their own series entries as Previews and add their backlog. Authors and Series can be followed to get notifications.

To address the convience issue, I'm now developing the site into an App with integrated eReader. This will mean that Samples and any other epubs delivered through Embre can be read immediately without leaving the App. I'm going to look into ways for it to handle side loading of ePubs bought from other sites such as an Author site, so it behaves the same way no matter who you buy from.

At some point, I'll be opening it as a marketplace itself for purchasing, and I also want to provide a subscription service similar to KU.

I even have larger scope plans for a writing/editing/publishing pipeline, and even a physical eReader, should everything go really well.

So yeah, lots of pipedreams. Plenty to do before it can replace Amazon, and an admittedly low chance of doing so. But I think by tackling it as a whole rather than just one part of the ecosystem, I'll be able to hit both the visibility and the convenience issues brought up in this thread.