Quote:
Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
Yes I was thinking along the line of offering the Kindle ebook catalog to other hardware to grab even more customers. Did not occur to me that it would be such a huge investment for Amazon and at possibly no significant extra sales.
Maybe I just don't like Kindle on principal, only because I disliked how Amazon was trying to lock you into their books and nothing else when the very first Kindle came out. That there was lack of competition at that time (was it only 2007? seams they been around for a lot longer) did not apparently occur to me.
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There actually was an entrenched competitor playing the exactly the same walled garden Model that Kindle launched with: Sony, with their proprietary LRF format. They had the name, the tech, and a one year lead on Kindle. Unlike Amazon, that stuck with their business model (if nothing else, to justify buying Mobileread) Sony switched to epub and promptly became just one of the Adobe-client state crowd.
As for lock-in, consider this: all the people buying the interoperable "open" Adobe DRM ebooks are just as locked-in to Adobe client readers as Kindle owners are locked-in to Amazon. So what's the difference? How is being locked-in to the product line of one giant multinational (adobe) all that different to being locked-in to the product line of another big multinational (amazon?).