[dhbailey]

What I've read and heard about the Kindle is that you need to buy special Kindle-format Mobi books (different DRM from the other mobi readers) so I'm not sure if you can automatically get new versions of the mobi books you've already bought or not. I would hope that you could, but in this "you can't have that drm book, it's MINE MINE MINE" attitude of the ebook distributors and publishers, I suspect that you might have to buy a new copy of that mobi book, just as you need to buy different versions of the books you've bought for the Sony if you want to read them on the Kindle.

As for Sony not using mobipocket's format since Amazon owns it, I don't see why that would stop anybody -- the sole purpose of selling hardware is to sell content, so it shouldn't matter to Amazon what reader their mobipocket books end up on, they'll still make some money on each sale.

I forgot to add that Sony would also make money on each sale, so everybody would win, since the mobipocket encoding would be for a specific Sony device. That's what's supposedly going to happen with the mobi files -- you can't take a Palm mobipocket file and simply copy it to the Kindle, the ones you buy for the Kindle will have to be encoded with DRM allowing that specific Kindle (or however many you have activated on your Amazon/Kindle account) to be able to read that mobibook. You won't be able to hand them to friends to read on their Kindles any more than we can hand Sony files around to each other if they're the DRM files of current books.