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Originally Posted by kennyc
Agreed. Epub appears to be the winner to me what with Sony and B&N both moving to it and the stores like BooksOnBoard, etc supporting it. It's almost like everyone is lining up on the side opposite Amazon.
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Amazon has sold ebooks before... and then decided they weren't profitable enough, dropped them, and the customers who'd bought from them couldn't move their books to new computers after they updated.
There's certainly nothing in the Kindle arrangement that prevents them from doing so again. This time, it's profitable... for now. But Amazon's already shown itself as ready to abandon current customers if a new, better fad comes along. It's not implausible that, if Amazon switches to ePub, they'll do so with the Kindle 3--and K1, K2 and DX users will just no longer be able to buy ebooks from Amazon. And eventually, they'll decide they don't want to pay for the server costs for those accounts, and the browsing costs, and shut them off entirely.
That's not a prediction. Maybe it won't happen that way. But it did happen, almost exactly that way, before--and Amazon's not issuing any promises that it won't do so again.