Quote:
Originally Posted by =X=
Follow the money, is it in selling device or selling and controlling the content.
that said I think they will be very interested.
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I doubt it, for precisely the "follow the money" reasons.
Amazon is trying to butter their bread on both sides. They sell the Kindle, and they sell content for the Kindle through the Kindle store. They offer better pricing on ebooks through the Kindle store -- if you own a Kindle to buy it.
They are trying to use their control of the content to leverage sales of the Kindle, and vice versa. The more Kindles that are sold, the more content for them they can sell.
And let's say Mobipocket
does license the reader to Sony (which I doubt, given their previous assertion that they must be the only DRM solution on a dedicated device). Where will Sony Reader users get content?
The complaint against Sony is the vastly larger amount of content available on Amazon for the Kindle. Mobipocket sells content separately, but can't match Amazon's pricing. Neither can other vendors selling Mobipocket format ebooks.
Yes, there's a lot of content not protected by DRM in Mobipocket format. But most folks want to buy current titles in ebook format, and that almost certainly
will be protected by DRM.
Like I said, I can't see Mobipocket licensing the format to Sony (or being allowed to by Amazon, even if they wished to), and I can't see being able to read Mobipocket content on the Sony Reader as a big win for the majority of Sony users, because the content they'll be able to read may not the be content they
want, and if it is, it will cost a lot more.
If I owned a Sony Reader, I'd certainly want to be able to read Mobipocket content on it, but I'm not typical of the market. I'm not especially interested in current commercial titles.
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Dennis