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Originally Posted by BobVA
I'm hoping Sony is getting out of the direct content sales business and will let others (e.g. Amazon) handle that for them. The longer everybody clings to their proprietary formats, the less likely ebooks are to survive.
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I'm not sure I'm thrilled by the idea of Amazon being the sole source of licensed electronic content. But in general, I'm not pleased by anybody being the sole source of anything.
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I can't believe that Amazon really wants to be in the hardware business, either.
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Why shouldn't they be, if they can make money on it?
And they probably can. Amazon has an enormous amount of electronic content, and better pricing on titles available elsewhere--
if you have a Kindle. They are using their position as the biggest content provider to leverage sales of their device, and I suspect it's working. Amazon is the 800lb gorilla in the ebook market, and more than happy to use its size and weight to achieve its goals.
Amazon isn't a manufacturer. They contract out actual production of the Kindle to some Chinese manufacturer, and simply handle sales, distribution, and support, which is something they already do anyway as part of their web operations.
The only questions, which we haven't enough information to answer, are how well the Kindle is selling, whether it's meeting their projections, and whether it makes enough money to justify continuing to offer it. Since they are still actively pushing it, it appears the answers to the last two questions are "yes".
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Dennis