You don't find good e-books on Amazon by browsing. Pretty much everything you find is crap. "Anyone can be an author" is great until everyone is. Then it sucks.

You don't find good e-books on Amazon by browsing. Pretty much everything you find is crap. "Anyone can be an author" is great until everyone is. Then it sucks. Apps are exactly the same; almost everything is crap. Perhaps one in a thousand apps is worth a buyer's time, just to read the description. So you need a gatekeeper. But not just one -- you need a number of them. In the physical book world these are publishers. There are many good and bad effects to publishers, but one of the good effects is that they screen out huge amounts of crap before it's ever inflicted on the public. I don't buy e-books by using the Kindle store. I go through physical book listing only, presuming that if it's made it past a publisher, it might be worth my time to look at. After I find something interesting, I'll flip over to the digital version if that's what I'm interested in. To solve the app store problem there needs to be more than one store. There needs to be a lot of stores. These can be _within_ Google's or Apple's store. Professional publishers can partner with selected application vendors, roughly "endorsing" apps. Publishers can join together to form groups, and groups can create storefronts. As a buyer I can then pick and choose from storefronts/publishing groups that organize and choose books that are appropriate for me. App sellers will have to give up some of their (non-existent, because nobody knows the app is there) revenue to the publishers in exchange for the service. As long as the buyer and can shift and select from between publishing groups, and the base provider (like Google) makes it _tough_ to become a publisher or group, it stands a chance.