People love the convenience of grabbing sample chapters and buying and downloading a book that strikes their fancy; but I see many criticisms of the hardware, chief among them the generally dogginess of the eInk screen, the high price, and the ease with which you can accidentally change pages just picking up or carrying the thing around.

So, why not offer us who lack the Kindle the chance to buy Amazon Kindle editions? A reader for a laptop, another for the smartphone.

Is it because Amazon doesn’t feel comfortable as yet in completely displacing publishers? Or is this in the plans down the road?

Even authors who want to publish their own works in the Kindle platform can’t see what their kindle-editions will look like, without shelling out the money for the hardware.

Apple tries to keep a vertical integration because they make their money off the hardware. But it’s hard to believe that Amazon makes that much on the Kindle when you consider the fees they must be paying for the wireless bandwidth. They stand to make a lot more, in the long run, as a publisher of Kindle editions.