Okay, I’ll cut to the chase here and begin by inviting you to participate in the Winter 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey. Here’s a link:

But before you head over there — as I hope you will do in the next few moments — let me share a few words about why your participation is so important.

It seems like centuries ago in Kindle time, but in the late summer of 2009, it was big news when Amazon sold more ebook copies than print copies of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. Within a year, that trend had spread to Amazon’s entire catalog, taken together: the company was selling more ebooks than print books overall, even though print sales themselves continued to increase.

But the velocity of change keeps increasing by astonishing leaps and bounds, and now we have learned that in each of the first three weeks following Christmas, publishers sold more ebooks than print books for over 35% of the top 50 titles on the USA Today bestseller list, including all of the top 6 books on the list last week.

So it is not hyperbole to say that there’s a revolution taking place in how we choose, buy, and read the books we love, and — just as importantly — in the roles that authors, publishers, retailers, agents and others play in bringing those books into existence, bringing them to your attention, and, of course, dividing up your book-buying dollar.

As a citizen of Kindle Nation, you are probably well aware already that you have a front row seat for this revolution. But it’s even better than that: as the greatest readers in the world, we are key participants in the revolution, at the barricades, making individual decisions that aggregate into larger trends that will force change upon the other participants. Whether or not we want to be change agents does not matter. To mangle a line from a recent election campaign, we are the change that traditional publishers have been having nightmares about.

Sometimes this kind of change occurs when the other participants figure out the trends and change their ways. Other times change occurs when those who don’t figure out the changing marketplace simply get run over and are replaced by those who do.

The dumbest of the dinosaurs never get beyond blaming and whining about the other players who they identify as leading the charge and forcing the changes. But the truth is that, as visionary and adaptive and aggressive as the change agents may be, if it hadn’t been them, it would have been somebody else.

If it hadn’t been Amazon and the Kindle, it would have been some other company and some other ebook reader. If it hadn’t been change-making authors like April Hamilton, Joe Konrath, Amanda Hocking, and Imogen Rose, it would have been other authors.

Change takes place when it is enabled by technology, by markets, and most of all by people. Change keeps a sharp eye out for market inefficiencies, for outmoded or unnecessary intermediaries, and for opportunities to improve the array of choices for, in this case, readers and writers. Change isn’t “right” or “wrong,” but like the sun that will rise again tomorrow morning, there’s not much of a percentage in opposing it.

Here, once again, is the link to participate in the survey: