If I understand the post you linked to, he's going with AmazonEncore as a
publisher (as opposed to just a distributor) for one book (with another to come) and since Amazon is the
publisher of the paper book, they are also limiting his sales of electronic copies to the Kindle store only. Publishing with AmazonEncore is NOT the same thing as self-pubbing but only putting up copies on Amazon.
Konrath has always been a proponent of experimentation. I'm astonished that he would go back on his "sell in as many stores as possible" philosophy, but it's possible that he sees this as another of his many eBook experiments. He seems to be experimenting with minimizing the set costs of book production and maximizing his sales, and I imagine we'll see a future post about how AmazonEncore did/didn't stack up to the alternative. So yay for anecdata.
HOWEVER. I am sick and tired of everything being EPUB MOBI KINDLE AMAZON WAH. Konrath's philosophy of eBook selling -- which is the context in which I quoted him -- is valid
regardless of whatever Kindle exclusive experiment he's trying out this week, and I would like to respectfully ask you not to derail the discussion into another discussion about authors who don't publish outside of Amazon.
Furthermore, I am perfectly capable of reading Amazon books on every reading device I own, so if I ever DO decide to read Konrath's fictional writings, I don't foresee an Amazon exclusive deal being a problem for yours truly. Joe seems to be aware of that, in fact. From the same article (though not Joe speaking):
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But ebooks are digital. While you can't play an 8 track on your iPod, right now, using free software, you can format Kindle mobi files into epub files, playable on Nook, Sony, and Kobo. You can also strip DRM and format epub into mobi, if you know what you're doing.
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