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I was a big fan of Amazon when they first opened up. It was a godsend to somebody living (at the time) in an area without a decent bookshop. Orders dropped off after I moved to large cities that could support specialised bookstores, then increased again after I moved to a smaller city.
At about the same time I was getting into DVDs, and was developing a considerable antipathy towards region-coding and thus DRM.
Then a combination of antipathy over Amazon's anti-competitive use of its 'One Click' software patent, and the discovery that (if I waited a few months) I could buy second-hand/remaindered books online for less than Amazon's prices, drove me elsewhere.
Then ebooks came along. I was first introduced to them by Baen's CDs in their hardcovers and read them, first as PDFs, then as epubs on FBReader, on my desktop. It therefore made sense to me, when I decided to try a hardware eReader, to buy one that had FBReader and supported epubs -- a Pocketbook, as it turns out. So I've never bought into the Amazon ebook ecosystem, and have little desire to experience its DRM first-hand.
I still buy computer hardware off Amazon (the SSD and CPU heatsink for my latest system are on their way even as we speak) and the occasional other odds and ends that I cannot pick up locally (or more cheaply through eBay).
I do however recognise Amazon's place in making ebooks ubiquitous and funding, through their ecosystem, innovation in ebook technology. This makes them (tangentially) useful to me. The Big Five publishers? Not so much -- they are largely superfluous as far as I'm concerned. Though I do have use for smaller and more innovative publishers like Baen and Tor (acknowledging that the latter is now part of Holtzbrinck).
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