Quote:
Originally Posted by Rizla
Amazon's business model is a closed one, and they share this strategy with all the other big players (Kobo, Sony, B&N).
Amazon has gone one step further by using their own proprietary format. To suggest that the decision to use .mobi (and not support .epub) is merely 'historical' and unrelated to proprietorial strategy is ridiculous. Amazon know exactly what they are doing. Sure you can convert with Calibre, but the average user can't do that.
All the big players want to lock users into their store and control the electronic book market. Amazon have just gone one step further to do it.
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Amazon doesn't lock their customers away from other vendors. Not at all. As Prestidigitweeze correctly mentioned a few days ago, Amazon makes it "hellishly easy" to purchase from their own store. Therefore, most Kindle users purchase from Amazon.
Epub didn't exist when Amazon purchased Mobipocket. It was released in October 2007 and the first Kindle was launched a few weeks later. Sony added Epub support the following year and Amazon chose to remain with mobi. If Amazon had chosen to adopt Epub, they probably would NOT have adopted ADE. ADE would have cost Amazon millions of dollars a year and provided no benefit. If Amazon had Epub and their own DRM, it would be exactly the same as it is now. The proprietary format isn't the issue, it never was the issue. The DRM is the problem.