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Originally Posted by elemenoP
It's the walled garden: Amazon wants to give you the convenience of the hardware, software, and content all working seemlessly together. Well, Amazon would call that convenience, others would call it "locking you in." (Apple has the same strategy and wants you inside THEIR walled garden.) According to Amazon's party line, they can offer more features by controlling their own ebook format. And I do think they have actually done this. Kindle format has page numbers that correspond to the print edition of the book. Kindle format can sync audiobook progress to ebook progress. Kindle format has X-Ray.
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Also, they tailor the format features to what the reader hardware can support.
Like, with KF8 they picked out a subset of epub 3 features that matter to their core business and their hardware can render smoothly and left the rest out. (It let them get rich content ebooks to market two years ahead of the committee guys.) Another thing they do is that kindles actually support four different formats, plus pdf, and all the user needs to know is that it's a kindle book. Everything else is handled behind the curtains.
A lot of proprietary systems claim they need total control to ensure a satisfactory user experience: some live up to that, some do not. Amazon does.