Here’s an interesting thing. In a conversation I had with an industry insider (who spoke on condition of anonymity), I was told an interesting thing. This person told me that Mobipocket (now a subsidiary company of Amazon), who had promised in May 2008 to have an official iPhone Mobipocket reader client out by the end of the year, had finished the reader by August—but that Amazon was sitting on them, not permitting them to release it.

Though there are other readers (such as Bookshelf) that read Mobipocket books on the iPhone, none of them will read DRM-encrypted books the way an official Mobipocket reader could. Thus, the lack of a Mobipocket reader app for the iPhone means that all the stores that sell DRM-locked Mobipocket books (and all the locked books an iPhone owner might already have bought from when he had something else) are useless to an iPhone owner (unless he wants to break the law by removing the DRM).

and not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong.

amazon won’t last forever — nothing does –
and i can totally see entities nibbling its edges,
picking niches and specializing to superiority.

but to posit that something cobbled together
and outsourced, something that is “not good,
but good enough” can displace it? that’s silly.
it would be quite comical to see anyone try it.
unfortunately, i don’t think anyone is so stupid.

the only thing in “decliine” here is your spelling.

-bowerbird

You are very much right to say it is easy to set up a book store with free or very cheap components – although as you say Amazon could still be involved via Amazon Web Services (storage via S3 – as well as EC2, and simpleDB). I think it is just a case of people just doing it.

Amazon became the platform, problem with that is it becomes much much harder to dislodge a platform if every that want’s to dislodge it is perched firmly atop.