It always bugs me when people climb on Amazon's ass about being a defacto ebook monopoly. I was in the ebook industry from 1999-2001 and watched publishers, retailers and software companies consistently talk an ebook strategy while doing ridiculous things they could not reasonably have expected to succeed. I referred to these as "ebook vaccines." Some VP is tasked with exploring ebooks so they put forward a shitty program designed to fail, then they could say "We tried those, they didn't work."

Look at what Sony did to create an ebook market with their several year e-ink head start. They got halfway there and then lost interest in creating a compelling end-to-end solution.

This is one of the ways a monopoly forms, when you are the only player committed to creating a market and putting forth a credible effort. I want there to be credible competition to Amazon to keep their business sensible, but let's be real. They were the business entity with their ebook head farthest from their ebook asses.