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Question from the audience:
"I was wondering what your philosophy is regardining openness of that platform. We've seen with the iPhone what openness, or at least a degress of openness, can do. An example is, I guess, there's an appllication called Savory, that a lot of usKindle owners have tried to download, it helps us to read PDFs, epub, things of that nature. But what we hear is that Amazon traditionally pushes against independent developers trying to develop applications, that are trying to make the Kindle more useful for its user. So, where do you guys stand on that."
"Well, we have, you know, we're try--we actually are putting more and more native formats on the device. Kindle DX is the first device to have the native PDF format, and I would like to see more native formats on the device over time as well. So, again, the way we're looking at this business, the, as, we want, the, is really two businesses. We have the Kindle bookstore, and we want the Kindle books to be readable on every hardware device. And we want this [the Kindle] to be the best reading device. And I don't think the Kindle format is going to be the only format people want to read. So we have to make PDFs available on this. We have a very good, you know, Word Docs, and so on actually work very well on this We convert them to Kindle format, in large part so we can do some of the special stuff that we do with the Kindle format, like WhisperSync and font size changes and things like that. But [...] it would make sense, I think, to have that device also be able to read other formats natively."
He goes on to say that the lack of folder support, changelogs, feedback on the message boards, etc. are simply incompetence on their part, not intentional.
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