Quote:
Originally Posted by JoeD
As long as amazon don't ban alternative apps from been able to read drm-free or non-amazon format ebooks, I don't see too much of an issue with it.
It's their device, if they want to focus their attention on supporting their own store/format that's up to them. If users feel the experience offered by epub or other stores is superior to that of the apps that ship with the device, they'll install the app needed to use it/them. If users feel Amazon are going out of their way to make it difficult to do that, then I'm sure customers will start to look for alternatives in the future and it'll start to bite amazon on a HW level (as long as amazon continue to make kindle apps for other devices). I can't say I liked having to use wordpad or ms paint when I used to use windows, so I bought/installed better apps 
Really it's no different to Apple pushing ibooks on the iPad. You can still download alternative apps to read kindle books or other formats/stores. |
It is different than what Apple does.
Apple provides iOS apps for reading ebooks, playing music, displaying photos, and watching videos. Whether you purchase that media from iTunes or sideload it, all of the media is presented as a cohesive collection on the device.
On the Kindle Fire, sideloaded music appears under the "Music" tab. sideloaded ebooks will appear under the "Books" tab if the books are in mobi/azw format. (I'm ok with that...even though iBooks supports ePub and PDF). But sideloaded video, regardless of format, will not appear in the "Video" tab. Nor will sideloaded docs appear in the "Docs" tab.
The difference is that Amazon refers to the "Kindle Fire" as a service... in much the same way that cable TV requires a settop cable box. Granted, sideloading of media and apps are permitted, but are not "encouraged". For example, back in the early days of the KF, the Silk browser would redirect any APK store URL to the Amazon App store. Another example: to this day one cannot install an alternate web browser from the Amazon app store.
On the flipside, Apple isn't too concerned about the source of the media (although the obviously push iTunes), they are about the "destination". As long as the media ends up on an iOS device Apple is pleased. They are not concerned about making their media available on non-iOS devices though, which for some is the sticking point.
In a nutshell:
Amazon is focused on the source of the content -> Amazon services
Apple is focused on the target of the content -> iOS devices
That's the fundamental difference between the iPad and Kindle Fire. Although one is not necessarily worse or better than the other, they ARE different.