[Monteagle]

Amazon's far more likely to shut Mobipocket down than to enable Kindle reading with Mobipocket Reader. I don't think I would buy any more Mobipocket ebooks. The Kindle cannot read or convert DRM Mobipocket ebooks so its loyal Mobipocket customers cannot buy the device and transfer over.

... And Amazon does shut things down as they did with ALL ebooks a year ago. They only have five people working in the Mobipocket Paris office. And when their server went down, they left the French guys hanging and down for ten solid days.

This is a play for control and complete dominance, pure and simple. Amazon wants to end up dictating how much we pay for books, who gets to sell them, which authors get promoted, etc.

You can best judge future behavior by monitoring past behavior. With Amazon, the last year alone tells the story. My bet: They will wind down Mobipocket over the next year and they will start charging for use of WhisperNet by next Christmas.

A $99 device that can read all formats is the way to go. That can happen... except it probably won't read Sony or Kindle because Amazon and Sony won't let it. So that rules out Sony, Kindle and Mobipocket. Leaves Adobe and eReader, and Microsoft, but Microsoft seems already out of play with its format. Let's hope Adobe's up to the task. They allegedly have mobile solutions coming for Digital Editions soon. That will help - a lot.