Amazon announced plans to make its Kindle titles available for a variety of mobile phones. Earlier this year they announced that they would no longer support PDF or Microsoft Reader formats for their ebooks, effectively locking buyers into its Mobipocket or Kindle formats.

Since the Kindle format is only an offshoot of the Mobipocket format, I wonder if these mobile device efforts will revolve around an updated Mobipocket Reader. The Mobipocket Reader software is already available for a variety of mobile phones including Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian. If Amazon plans to revamp this application to make it available for other handhelds including iPhone – and they can duplicate the easy buying experience Kindle owners already enjoy – this could really change the landscape for ebooks.

In an article entitled The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age, published earlier this week, Ars Technica’s John Siracusa lamented that dedicated ebook readers are not the entire answer, and asked why Amazon didn’t realize that devices like the iPhone were where reading was headed.

I do still believe that dedicated readers are more appropriate for a mature e-book market, when consumers can more easily justify the cost of such a specialized device. But that doesn’t mean a dedicated reader can’t succeed. The Kindle is the best example, hitching itself to the star of Amazon’s existing retail store. Maybe Amazon will haul the ungainly Kindle right across the critical mass threshold and it will become “the iPod of e-books.” Then again, maybe Apple will finally figure out that the iPod (and, yes, the iPhone) is “the iPod of e-books.” Amazon’s efforts are handicapped by the hurdle of that separate hardware purchase, so the door is still open for a strong competitor targeting an existing reader-capable hardware platform, whether it be Apple or someone else.

John also suggested that Apple was best positioned to lead us to the ebook promised land.

Will Apple wake from its apparent slumber and pull the sword from the stone—the sword that’s currently taped to its hand and sheathed in a teflon-lined crevice? That’d certainly be the shortest path between the present and the inevitable e-book future.

I say if Amazon plays this right and creates applications that open their ebook store to a variety of devices – including iPhone- they may actually hold Uther’s sword. But controlling formats and owning the largest selection of current and best selling books won’t in itself make this a winning solution. Amazon needs to deliver the right experience, making both the buying and reading of ebooks easy and enjoyable.

What do you think – major shift, or just another ripple?

(Image credit DaveQ)

Several companies found out today when Amazon.com’s S3 service experienced an outage and left applications without their data tier. I first experienced it this morning about 8:30 EST when those of us on Twitter noticed that avatars were not loading. Later reports of missing images on Facebook, and other applications started rolling in as startups and application developers realized their apps were broken due to the Amazon S3 outage.

So, what to do when you rely on the cloud? Simple – don’t rely on the cloud completely.

SmugMug’s Don MacAskil has it right, and discussed his approach on TechCrunch’s report of the outage:

We do rely on S3 for our primary storage, but we do maintain our own “hot cache” of data in our datacenters, too, which is less than 10% of our total storage. Our customers weren’t affected by this morning’s outage.

PBwiki’s Nathan Schmidt agrees:

Never build your architecture to require low-latency, high-availability access to S3 or its competitors, because you won’t get those – that’s not what it’s for, that’s not what it’s optimized for, and you’re never going to be able to peel back those layers of abstraction and long-haul network.

(Photo credit akakumo)