[nairbv]

wmaurer: You have every reason to be angry and disappointed, but not with your decision. Be angry with Amazon, not yourself. Amazon just shit on you. Why does that make you think you should have bought from Amazon? I used to buy a lot of books from Amazon, but I'm going to look for somewhere else to buy paper books now.... and I'm not even someone who owns mobipocket books. I don't trust them anymore. I used to like Amazon.

If you bought the Amazon device they'd just shit on you later instead of sooner. You now see that they're obviously willing to do it. And your bike trip? You can't use a Kindle outside the US. Cybook was the right decision.

If you bought the Kindle, and Kindle books, and then your Kindle got rained on or broken or lost somewhere along the way, you'd have to buy a new Kindle to read your books. If you lose your cybook, you can buy a new cybook, or a palm, or a computer, or a hanlin v3, or an iliad, or even a phone and still have your content.

If the kindle isn't successful, it'll be dumped, and you'll be left to fill your bike panniers with paper books.

To all of you saying "Amazon will/won't dump MobiPocket." They don't have to "dump" mobipocket, but they're just not going to be as motivated to hire the best people to seek out the best content for a service that competes with their own. Of course they'll keep selling whatever books they sell (as long as it's bringing in money), but they'll always have more titles available in the more proprietary Kindle format. They also have no reason to lower prices for mobipocket formated books or really try to compete, unless an actual competitor in the same market comes along.

Also, I agree with what jasonkchapman said about the contracts. Amazon negotiated to distribute books in kindle-format. They didn't negotiate them for mobipocket format, and so don't have the rights to distribute them as such. They probably couldn't legally sell kindle books on a non kindle device even if they wanted to. Negotiating for mobipocket distribution will be up to some other manager in some other department operating in some subsidiary that amazon doesn't care about anymore. Amazon bought the technology, and wants to sell books on Amazon.com. Sure if a few extra bucks come in from mobipocket.com that's great but it's not as important to them.

Some of you are saying Amazon/kindle loses 5$/book. I've read that typical wholesale price of ebooks in that range around about 10$, and that typically ebook resellers sell them for around $18. This would suggest that Amazon just doesn't make a profit on bestsellers, not that they lose money. We hear from the publishers that Amazon isn't getting some special deal, but it still might have come out to a price of $9 instead of $10 based on volume and such, not a significant negotiation but giving them *some* revenue. This also suggests that the profit margin on best sellers on sites like mobipocket is $8. This probably currently makes sense given ebooks are still fairly new, still low volume, and that they have significant development costs to recoup. Amazon might be hoping to be high-enough volume and long-term enough that low-profit margins can be overcome with high volume.

It is quite frustrating that more content isn't available. This is the fault of Amazon. Amazon has worked to cripple the ebook market, and it takes away my confidence in the mobipocket book system that otherwise would have been a good way to buy ebooks. I'm tempted to think that amazon is intentionally disrupting and delaying the widespread adoption of ebooks, to maintain their primary revenue source.

Someone should come out with yet another DRM content system to be the next mobipocket, running on all available devices like mobipocket did, but not being owned buy a company that wants to shit on it's customers. Hopefully this will happen, and it will either replace mobipocket, or the amazon people will be forced to keep mobipocket competitive. Either way, if there's a mobipocket format AND a competing format, both of which run on a plethora of devices, (and internationally) the consumers will be OK. I can dream that someday we won't have DRM, and that might just be a dream... but I'm quite convinced that one-format-to-one-device services will not be the future of DRM.

Anyone want to start (or fund) a company? As others have said, the publisher deals with Amazon are not exclusive. Mobipocket was successful and a lot of people (like me) will be afraid to buy from them now. I don't think companies like cybook or hanlin or irex have *exclusive* deals with mobipocket do they? I can write code (or hire cheap Chinese programmers, I'm in China now) :-P. We'd have to act fast... hehe.

I also feel like what Amazon did with mobipocket aught to be illegal. There should be some kind of antitrust laws protecting us from that kind of behavior. The US legal system needs some serious reevaluation to take into account the ramifications of the current digital age. We should at a bare minimum be protected from companies completely dropping support for DRM products as has happened more then once, when some company says "download your music for the last time" and it will never play on another device again. They're should be some kind of consumer protection or contractual obligation of the company that "sells" you DRM content.

Actually, now that I've finished (reading as I write this) the whole thread, I see that it is illegal in some countries. Good to hear.

Maybe in a few years Kindle will just fail, and Amazon will forget about trying to be a hardware/service company, will fully adopt Mobipocket, and will work to make more titles available for mobi and just fully utilize that revenue stream. When/if that happens, it will make the current cybook purchases still the right decision. I can't imagine a one-format-one-device service could possibly be successful in the long term, and as long as they dont' go so far as pulling the plug on mobipocket DRM servers, mobipocket still has the best DRM service out there. Too many unsuspecting customers of devices like the kindle or sony will buy the device, be angry, and tell their friends to buy from the competitor. These lame systems will all have to disappear eventually.

I want the option to buy DRM content. I never have though because I don't trust any of the people who sell it. There's no incentive for them to be nice to us. If Amazon had played nice with mobi as I expected, I would have been thrilled and bought mobi books (as soon as I had a mobi-reading device). Now I might end up buying something that doesn't even support mobipocket, like the hanlin v3. It's that or the cybook.

-brian