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Originally Posted by notimp
Let us please stick to - amazon has created an entirely new format, that only they can produce - that is designed, so only they can produce it - that already gets autodelivered (with no opt out) on all channels and devices that matter (in their business case) - with the very thing some in here think that we should cheer for being - that Amazon somewhere, somehow still might provide a legacy format, they could face out at any point in time - providing you introduce a second login, a second device, and ten more clicks per book to the occasion.
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I disagree with just about all of your points. Amazon doesn't sell MOBI or KF8 or KFX files. It sells books that can be read using Kindle apps and devices. The file formats used in the course of making that happen are an implementation detail that is irrelevant to almost all customers, authors and publishers.
Authors and publishers should be unconcerned with KFX. They just need to supply books to Amazon in one of the several intake formats that Amazon supports. Nothing has changed there and most of those intake formats are also supported by the other major e-book sellers.
Most customers should be unconcerned with KFX. They just want to buy and read a book with as little effort and unnecessary complexity as possible. They aren't worried about being able to read on non-sanctioned devices or the long-term availability of books beyond the lifetime of Amazon's ecosystem.
It used to be that you needed to know quite a bit about various formats, manual downloading, format conversion, and organization of files in order to read e-books. These days, the existence of closed e-book ecosystems from Amazon, Apple, B&N and Kobo eliminates all of those concerns for the majority who just want to read. It is mainly the early adopters of e-books and e-book collectors who are concerned with e-book formats and tools like calibre. Only those in this a small minority, like myself, are concerned with details such as KFX.
I don't feel that Amazon has any obligation to make breaking books out of their closed ecosystem easy to do. It does not surprise me when they close a loophole that allows books to be stripped of DRM and converted to other formats. I am glad that they have left some well-known ones open so far. It is the responsibility of those of us who wish to extricate our books to go through whatever steps are necessary to make it happen. If Amazon makes it too difficult they will loose our business. We are too few for that to matter to them.