|
Okay, after thinking about this a leetle bit further, I came up with this:
Is Amazon likely to start selling its books in anything other than its existing format? Two formats? I doubt it. But Amazon always wants to find ways of selling to more people.
So it seems sensible that their acquisition of Lexcycle could be to speed up the process of developing apps for non-Kindle devices, to expand the range of devices that can read Amazon’s e-books. As they have already embraced the iPhone, and Lexcycle has made clear that they wanted to develop Stanza for other devices (meaning more customers), aiding that process would make sense. As I’ve said before, not everyone in the world owns an iPhone.
The alternative would be that Amazon wants to quash non-Kindle access to their store. This doesn’t seem to make sense, as it means they are limiting their potential customer base.
The third possibility, that Amazon wants to quash ePub, just seems ludicrous. The genie’s already out of that bottle. But if future Stanza apps support AZW and not ePub (or just not support it as well as AZW), that would track with Amazon thinking.
|