[tomsem]

In your opinion, it is inferior. But your concerns and opinions are not shared by everyone. They're perfectly reasonable, but not the only reasonable ones out there.

They aren't scrapping their approach, they believe in it. From engineering perspective it makes sense, at least to me. 'What everyone else does' is not the only way of doing things. Amazon's advantage is that they have cloud resources to throw at every sort of technical problem, it's part of their business and they leverage it. And it allows them to make improvements and fixes more independently of device updates.

The others are trying to do everything as if it's still 2000. Cloud based services aren't part of their business, they're unwelcome expenses.

Put another way, others are building devices, Amazon is focussing on platforms, and they're successful at it. AWS is the most profitable business segment for them.

Monitoring of KU pages read (for example) is not of necessity retaining personally identifiable information. As I argued above, it's unnecessary to do so, and unwise to do so.

One can argue about the metrics they use to determine payout to KU authors, but they will all involve some way of tracking the actual borrows.

And of course Google oversteps. Nearly all of their money comes from selling customer profiles to advertisers. Amazon does its share of this as well but it's not the core business.