But if they really were separate, wouldn't I be able to buy e-books from amazon with a different device? And start my own bookshop for kindle users (maybe payin

But if they really were separate, wouldn't I be able to buy e-books from amazon with a different device? And start my own bookshop for kindle users (maybe paying amazon for traffic to the device)? You can definitely do the former. You can use your PC to buy Kindle books on Amazon and then read them on your iPhone or iPod touch. (You can't buy them directly on the phone, but who knows whether this decision was made by Amazon or by the Apple App Store guardians.) As for the latter, you can probably do that too, albeit in a pretty cumbersome way. Native PDF support on Kindle DX will make it much more viable, although the biggest barrier would be limited access to the Kindle's wireless connection. I suppose one possibility if you were making your own Kindle store would be to have your customers add your site's email address to your Kindle's whitelist of addresses allowed to send documents to your Kindle. This would mean customers would pay an extra $0.15 per MB with each transaction...but now that I think about it this is still way less than Amazon would charge you to sell a book in the Kindle store at Amazon.com....hmmm...I wonder if this may actually be viable?