[criddell]

It's the publishers that have handed Amazon their (near) monopoly on ebooks. If they wouldn't have insisted on DRM or at least had insisted on non-proprietary DRM, you would be able to buy books anywhere and read them anywhere.

I prefer reading on my Kindle to paper books but I also love browsing and supporting book stores and the people who work there. I've always wished that I could browse a bookstore, take a stack of books to the front and have them scan a QR code (or something like that) on my ereader and sell me digital copies of books rather than the paper copies.