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As to the article's content:
I don't think Amazon will ultimately be a publisher in any serious way. I'm not an expert on the subject, but I think self-publishing is different from publishing. Publishing has a lot more responsibility involved with it, I think. You also have to worry about what you're publishing more than Amazon seems to want to, at this point. (Why else let users upload their own works to the site?) I'm sure smarter people than me think it's a strong possibility that Amazon will become a bona fide publisher, but I just don't see it -- especially with the deal they have right now with authors. Seems like a lot more work than they need, frankly.
As for "pwned":
I'm not a fan of leetspeak, or of texting leaking into the English lexicon. Having said that, I can't deny that pwned is a word, simply on that basis alone. Written and spoken words are only symbolic. As long as two or more people agree on what aparticular set of written or spoken symbols mean, it's a word, in a literal sense. Its presence or absense in a dictionary ("Who's dictionary?" is also an interesting question) is immaterial. Shakespeare made up words all the time, and you don't hear people complaining about that, do ya?
On the other hand, I'm not a big fan of people texting phonetically. When you text phonetically, you're not making up a new word. You're just being lazy with your spelling. ("C u l8r." is not a collection of words, let alone a sentence.) If you're using an already-existing word in the English (or any other) language, you have to use conventional English rules to spell that word as it's properly spelled. It's not even so much that I object to people using that stuff amongst themselves. What I more resent is them not keeping their language in context, and allowing it to spew all over conventional speech, where it makes no sense and doesn't belong. (There are certain things that teke longer to type in text "language" than in English.)
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