[kjk]

Gizmodo: Why I only Buy Kindle Books

"(Jeff Bezos) doesn't to sell you a Kindle. He wants to sell you Kindle."

So there's two choices, really, if you're looking at ebooks. An agnostic piece of e-reader hardware that'll probably read a lot of the files and formats that are out there. It'll work, reasonably well, though it might not be all that reasonably easy to use. You'll probably do all of your reading on that one particular slab, if only because it's a pain to move the files around and keep them in sync. Or you can pick a platform, making a long-term investment in a service that you plan to stick with. It'll work, on at least a handful of devices, and it'll be really easy to get your books on all of them and pick up right where you left off, no matter what screen you're reading on.

I'm picking the platform that'll outlast the others, hoping I'll be able to read everything I've paid money for in a few years, on any screen. Right now, that seems like Amazon, even with their proprietary format and DRM. At least, I tend to side with the guy who says, "We think of it as a mission."

GigaOm: Why Amazon will Eventually Win the EBook Platform Wars

This is a big advantage for Amazon, for as more people start living multidevice lifestyles, such cross-platform availability of content will increasingly become a big deal. Unlike Amazon’s Kindle store, iBooks is going to be limited to the iPad/iPhone platform — which is not good enough for me. I like the flexibility of the Kindle app, even if it offers books to me in somewhat of a less attractive format. In other words, Amazon should be thinking about Kindle as a platform that leverages other people’s hardware.

I think it is interesting that in both articles (aimed at the more general public than Mobileread readers) there is no real mention of removing DRM, Topaz vs. AZW, ePub vs. PDF, e-Ink vs. LCD etc.