In a sudden sharp turn of direction for Amazon, they appear to be moving strong in the direction of the Copyright EBook market, head-on. They've recently purchased Booksurge (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/11/technology/11ecom.html), an on-demand book printing company, and also purchased... are you sitting down... Mobipocket! (details here (http://philadelphia.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/stories/2005/03/28/daily32.html)). In a less-publicized move in a related area, Amazon has apparently bought European-based Mobipocket, a PDA e-publishing competitor to Motricity (which owns what began as Palm-based ereading software and inventory). The move was disclosed as Franklin Electronic Publishers reported selling its shares in MobiPocket to Amazon for about $2.5 million, "in connection with Amazon's purchase of all MobiPocket's outstanding shares." Based in France, Mobipocket was founded in 2000 (as was BookSurge).
This could be good news for the EBook market, as well as developers of EBooks and EBook software and readers, whether supporting Copyrighted EBooks or otherwise.

Definately interesting times ahead!

Very interesting. I suspect Amazon will make it worth it for publishers to come out with a Mobipocket version of their ebook. And it would give Amazon a multi PDA/smartphone format of ebook to sell without paying eReader. (I think Amazon currently only sells ebooks in MSreader and PDF formats.)

Combined with the recent news of a mini-tablet PC and Bill Gates evangelizing it as an eBook reader, IMHO ebooks are about to hit the mainstream big time!

Brian

I think Amazon is doing the right thing by buying itself into the e-book market. The Mobipocket-Amazon deal isn't exactly new (I reported (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3728) about it earlier), but as Brian pointed out, this move becomes really interesting in the light of recent announcements like Bill Gates and his mini-tabled PC, and E Ink who is making the news almost every other day.

Guys, perhaps the e-book is finally ready for mainstream!

Hmm when I hear Mobipocket I am thinking of DRM ;( I hope Amazon is at least going to offer e-books in multi-format.

I don't like the DRM either, but if Amazon now "own" a multi-platform reader and ebook format, and already have the books on their site in electronic format, think of the potential for finally being able to get almost any book you want as an ebook! Amazon just might have the clout to make this happen.

Interesting times, indeed....

Craig.