They could interview a (fake) CEO lamenting that, despite all his efforts, he hasn’t been able to get Amazon to return his calls.”I just can’t understand it,” he says, “we’re doing everything right and yet they won’t call. And when I tried to talk to Bezos at a recent conference, he turned around and ran away.”

Up to this point, it appears that all they’ve wanted to do was keep Mobi—used by many DRM-using competitor e-book stores—off of the iPhone, and put their non-Mobi-reading Kindle app on iPhone instead.

Wonder if Stanza could now incorporate Mobipocket DRM into its reader with impunity, given that Amazon owns both it and them?

So it seems sensible that their acquisition of Lexcycle could be to speed up the process of developing apps for non-Kindle devices, to expand the range of devices that can read Amazon’s e-books. As they have already embraced the iPhone, and Lexcycle has made clear that they wanted to develop Stanza for other devices (meaning more customers), aiding that process would make sense. As I’ve said before, not everyone in the world owns an iPhone.

The alternative would be that Amazon wants to quash non-Kindle access to their store. This doesn’t seem to make sense, as it means they are limiting their potential customer base.

The third possibility, that Amazon wants to quash ePub, just seems ludicrous. The genie’s already out of that bottle. But if future Stanza apps support AZW and not ePub (or just not support it as well as AZW), that would track with Amazon thinking.