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Bezos is an apex predator, who has never even pretended to not be an ignore-what-I-say planet-destroying hypocrite where his business interests were concerned. To some degree, Google really has to fight fire with fire here. I remain a long ways away from tarring Google and Amazon with the same brush.

Check out The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2013). Captures the general tone of the organization brilliantly.

Amazon just removed encryption from its tablet devices — March 2016

Robin Handaly, an Amazon spokesperson, pushed back on criticism of the move.

"In the fall when we released Fire OS 5, we removed some enterprise features that we found customers weren't using," Handaly wrote in an email. "All Fire tablets' communication with Amazon's cloud meet our high standards for privacy and security including appropriate use of encryption."

Their customers didn't agree, and in this instance, Amazon was forced to eat crow and restore the feature.

Amazon's customer service backdoor — January 2016

... I contacted both Amazon Retail and AWS expressing my disappointment and asking them to put a note on my account that it is at extremely high risk of being socially engineered, and that I will always be capable of logging in. Amazon Retail said they would put a note, and have a specialist contact me (who never did) while AWS was dismissive of even a risk existing.

Amazon divulged his personal information to J. Random Blackhat twice more, despite this interaction.

Amazon Advertising Executive Fired for Refusing To Lie — November 2014

A former advertising executive for Kindle is suing Amazon for wrongful dismissal. The saga begins in 2012 with the launch of the Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet. Amazon was seeking launch partners in order to build traction with their Special Offers edition. Credit card company Discover signed on, as they normally participated with pilot projects at Amazon. Then things got interesting.

A classic Bezos manoeuvre. We know how that ended.

Prince Longshank's "high counsellor" shown the exit

Back when Amazon still mailed out DVDs, Bezos probably had that scene on repeat piped through the entire building.

My files on Google's malfeasance are hardly empty, but by comparison, they tend to lack that special Braveheart touch.

Amazon has pulled tons of comics from their Kindle Unlimited subscription services as well in the past: http://goodereader.com/blog/e-... Apparently the big 'problem' with comics (compared to novels) is that the average reader can/will read a few of them in an hour, as opposed to be a few days/weeks for a novel, which really skews the payments and projections, making them too expensive to cover costs under the subscription. Plus there's often extra deals with the publishers like no cost if the reader reads less than 10% of the book which is not uncommon with novels, but for the average comic books that's only a couple of pages so pretty much every reader hits the threshold.

The problem with these passive display technologies as photo frames has been that reflected light (like a photo) is dim and murky. Projected light (like an LCD or OLED) is bright and lively. Talk to any film photographer from back in the old days - they prefer slides to negatives partly for this reason. If you don't believe me, take a printed photo, scan it (or take a digital photo of it), then do an auto-levels adjustment to set the photo's white point at your monitor's max white, and the black point at its max black. Then hold the photo next to the monitor. There is just no comparison - the print will only have about 30%-50% the dynamic range of the monitor. That's the limitation of using reflected ambient light to indirectly generate colors, vs projected light to directly generate colors.

A passive display photo frame stood a chance two decades ago, when the nearest competitor would've been standard photo frames. But now that people have been "spoiled" by LCD photo frames, they don't stand a chance. The only one that did was the Mirasol stuff, which used interference patterns to generate colors (like a butterfly's scales). That had the potential to create colors which were much brighter than you could get by simply reflecting ambient light. But it never panned out - people were spoiled and wanted to be able to use it to view video in addition to just photos, and that turned it from a power miser into a power hog.

The market buys a lot of things, such as e-ink readers due to LCD sucking in direct sunlight. If the deliberately restricted market of e-ink opens up a bit due to real competition and is able to actually act like the market you describe then I think there will be room in the market for more devices.
Your snarky "market" comment is amusing considering the topic. Do you really know that little about what has been going on with e-ink for a decade?

But does it?
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/...
http://goodereader.com/blog/el...
http://www.mobileindustryrevie...

The e-ink readers has been in a decline for long and have had their peak "many" years ago.

The other guy said "oh buy you don't need color and animation for this purpose!" - yeah, that's the same Amazon argue and that's why their e-ink readers still suck. "But we don't need it because books don't have colors!" (or animations) - If you build it they will come. I don't fucking care that for thousands of years it's been ~black ~ink on ~pale surface of some sort for text. There's been other things too but that for text. I still want more, there's other things with more (magazines, comics, photos, ..)
The new Kindle Oasis is £270!! £270!!!! That's more than the fucking One Plus 3!!
It still has a shitty small grey-scale screen which is somewhat good for one purpose alone and that's to show black and white text. £270!! (And they don't even sell to Sweden.)
Heck, even I could likely get laid for less!

Please don't be fooled. This crowd funding campaign is merely selling a pre-made, year-old device from Netronix. See here: http://armdevices.net/2015/01/... http://blog.the-ebook-reader.c... http://goodereader.com/blog/el...

From Good eReader

In an incredibly stupid decision, the late Robert Jordan’s wife has caused the last Wheel of Time book, A Memory of Light, to be delayed until April after the print book is released this week. Originally it was scheduled to be delayed for a full year. According to Galleycat, this has, so far, resulted in 119 one star reviews (now up to 122) on Amazon. I suspect that this one star reviewer’s comment is typical: “I instead will search internet when I get home and will be paying the first industrious individual that has scanned the book and offered for sale.” I think that a lot of people will be looking around certain sites for scanned copies.

The actual author, Brian Sanderson, says that this decision was neither his nor Tor’s. On his blog he states:

This is not my decision or Tor’s decision, but Harriet’s. She is uncomfortable with ebooks. Specifically, she worries about ebooks cutting into the hardcover sales. It isn’t about money for her, as the monetary difference between the two is negligible here. It is about a worry that her husband’s legacy will be undermined if sales are split between ebooks and hardcovers, preventing the last book of the Wheel of Time from hitting number one on either list. (Many of the bestseller lists are still handling ebooks in somewhat awkward ways.)

As the last books have all hit number one, she doesn’t want to risk one of these not hitting number one, and therefore ending the series on a down note. (Even though each Wheel of Time book has sold more than its predecessor, including the ones I have worked on.) I personally feel her worries are unfounded, and have explained that to her, but it is not my choice and I respect her reasoning for the decision. She is just trying to safeguard Robert Jordan’s legacy, and feels this is a very important way she needs to do so. After talking about the issue, we were able to move the ebook up from the originally planned one-year delay to instead come out this spring.

After they came out in ebook form I threw out my collection of the hardcovers (the library didn’t want them) and bought them all in ebook format. As to the last book, given her attitude, I either won’t buy it at all or will find a free copy somewhere. When will people learn that defying the consumer is never a good business tactic. She has probably done more to hurt her husband’s legacy by this ill-conceived action than she can imagine. From now on Robert Jordan’s Memory of Light will be remembered by the reading community as the source of an ebook that the author’s wife didn’t want the public to have. I think I’ll go over to Amazon and, for the first time, leave a 1 star review.

You know you can install Android apps on it...right?

Too bad the W3C is now working on DRM for the web.
Encrypted Media Extensions

It is not possible to have an open web and have DRMed content. You cannot give me the keys and the encryption scheme and to expect DRM to work.

Microsoft, Google and Netflix want to add DRM-hooks to W3C HTML5 standard
The BBC Petitions the W3C to Implement DRM for HTML5

It's just like Flash or Silverlight but with the blessing of the W3C.
Open source browsers and open source systems like Linux cannot support the Encrypted Media Extensions, without binary blobs.

Sad that even Google is afraid to take on the iPad in it's territory. Almost all the 10" Android tablets have seen dismal sales, HP Touchpad was sold in a firesale,
Playbook's having a tough time and Amazon and Google are forced to play in the sub $200 territory. All of these devices are oriented towards only consumption. Maybe Microsoft Surface will get traction by doubling as a device that you can actually do some light work on, but lets see what price it launches at.

Yeah, the Asus Transformers sold so badly that they could barely keep them in stock at launch. Damn those poor sales!

Really? Selling out all 10,000 tablets at launch doesn't count. Do you have any hard numbers on sales?

http://goodereader.com/blog/tablet-slates/asus-issues-transformer-prime-update-sales-reported-to-be-dismal/

Colour is coming this year. Worthwhile colour isn't. I love eInk's pearl displays, but Triton, their first colour display, is garbage. The 10:1 contrast ratio on monochrome e-Ink is fine, and better than paperback books (which I believe are 8:1). But their Triton (colour) displays merely stick some colour filters on top of existing eInk pearl displays to produce an RGBW display, and those contrast ratios are just not high enough for that to work.

You compromise the monochrome image quality, and the colours are incredibly muted anyhow. Taking a look at Triton products (even Hanvon products) should illustrate how useless it is:

http://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/e-ink-triton-wins-innovation-of-the-year-award/

I think that eventually we'll get this right (perhaps when they make the stuff with actual coloured capsules rather than colour filters), but for now, monochrome is where it's at.

It seems it didn't take long for RIM to take action: http://goodereader.com/blog/tablet-slates/rim-plugs-dingleberry-hole/

"RIM ensured DingleBerry did not get the chance to make merry for too long. For no sooner had the DingleBerry app come into existence, RIM is back to seize the initiative with a fix that effectively plugs the hole that the DingleBerry developers had exploited to sneak past the PlayBook defenses. So those who had sought to gain root access to their PlayBook tablets, well RIM ensured they had less than a day to be adventurous with their devices.

The new RIM update should be available to all PlayBook owners within the next few days and being all of 5 MB, shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to install."

If the recent rumours turn out to be accurate, that matrix is simplified considerably, as epub would become the single most-supported "modern" format. Amazon's recently partnered with OverDrive, who do library e-book lending. OverDrive deals in audiobooks (mp3, wma) and ebooks (epub and pdf). It seems unlikely to me that Amazon would enter into an agreement with an entity that carries next to nothing that is readable on the Kindle.