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Originally Posted by J. Strnad
Amazon needs to get over its obsession with exclusivity. They've created "Kindle for PC" for every conceivable device except the thing you most want to read on...your non-Kindle reader. If every reading device on the market could display Amazon books, they would sell more books. If the Kindle could read ePub files, they'd sell more Kindles. What does Amazon want to sell, Kindles or books?
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Books.
Think of the Kindle as a device to prime the eBook pump. eBooks are a natural fit for Amazon. They are already the world's largest catalog retailer, and (I believe) the world's largest book retailer. They already had the infrastructure in place to display the catalog and take the order. Adding fulfillment, in the form of an immediate download as soon as the CC authorization happens, was a relatively trivial exercise. And ebooks don't have warehousing and distribution costs. For Amazon, what's not to like?
You can assume the Kindle makes money, but the Kindle barely scratches the surface of the potential ebook market. It's why Kindle apps started appearing for the PC, the iPhone, Android, and other platforms. Amazon wants to sell you ebooks.
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As long as the Agency 5 publishers insist on DRM, those authors who own their own stuff and are willing, even eager, to issue it DRM-free on multiple platforms...well, that's one teeny-tiny thing in our favor. If Amazon, B&N, and the publishers wised up and opened up, that one teeny-tiny advantage would disappear. But still, the whole industry would be much bigger and my itsy-bitsy piece of it would be bigger, too, maybe.
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Good luck.
Amazon doesn't use DRM to prevent unauthorized copying and sharing. They use it to lock you in to Amazon as the vendor. If you use a Kindle or a Kindle app, you have to buy your ebooks from Amazon. You
can't buy them from another vendor, because Amazon uses a proprietary form of DRM.
If your Mobi formatted book is not encumbered by DRM, you can procure it from any source and side-load it to a Kindle, but the vast majority of commercial titles are encumbered. To buy a title from anyone else, you must strip the DRM to read it with a Kindle or Kindle app.
Amazon has an enormous selection, good pricing, and generally good customer service, so Kindle users don't normally see vendor lock-in as an imposition, but vendor lock-in is the point of their exercise.
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Dennis