[freedomben]

The benefit (or potential gain) is that some people will just buy the book from the Kindle store to avoid the pain. I've seen that happen first-hand to my wife.

Also by emailing books or loading through their servers, they can still track and get that sweet sweet data/metadata that Amazon thrives on. When you sideload, you don't even have to connect it to the internet, which makes analytics more challenging.

[notatoad]

okay, but this all still seems like a needlessly complicated conspiracy theory.

if they want people to buy books from their store, why do they make it so easy to not buy books from their store?

bugs happen. not every bug is part of jeff bezos' nefarious plan.

[jakub_g]

It doesn't have to be a nefarious plan to put the bug in, but once it's there, it's guaranteed to be in the very bottom of the backlog to fix it.