|
Yes, I misread like some others here that the 80% was for Amazon's sales in the US. While Amazon is a player in the game, they are the only player doing things differently. And in this case, differently is not good (overall) for the users of Kindles.
The people who do not strip DRM and/or format shift may be OK for now given that Amazon's DRM works fairly seamlessly. But come the first time they start thinking of getting a different brand reader, it could all go south as they find that their library cannot go with them. Even if we didn't have DRM to contend with, all the people who do not know about Calibre or any other tools used to convert Mobipocket would be stuffed.
Now we know it's not possible for AZW/Mobipocket to be the #1 format. But it is the #2 format. It used to be a race between Mobipocket and MS Reader but now that ePub has taken over from MS Reader, it's clearly become #2. PDF (although not an eBook format) is #3. eReader is #4 and the rest don't really matter.
|