Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
Amazon is giving away the hardware. All that R&D money, all the money to manufacture...just to sell the tablets at cost.
It's completely fair for Amazon to lock down it's platform to make money on purchases of ebooks, movies and the like. That's the deal. Amazon doesn't make money selling the tablet, but does selling the content.
Razor - meet razor blade.
Lee
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Legal, maybe. Fair? That's not at all obvious. We aren't talking about Amazon locking out Barnes and Noble books. We're talking about downloading free public domain book. Whether you get that book from Amazon or Project Gutenberg, Amazon doesn't get any money from it. Thus we can dispense with the razor and razor blade analogy.
Sure, if someone puts a version of Oliver Twist that has added value, such as illustrations, an interactive table of contents or added commentary, then they may be able to charge something for it. But we aren't talking about such versions. We're talking about free versions.
Amazon has allowed side loading of books on their e-ink devices, you could even use the browser to download directly to your Kindle. If they have changed this with the Fire, they didn't go out of their way to actually tell anyone. Thus, customers would have a reasonable expectation that they would be able to continue sideloading e-books or to download them directly from the Fire's browser. Amazon doesn't offer free public domain books out of the goodness of their heart. If they were to stop offering free public domain books through the Kindle Store, they would probably be out of business fast.