Digital Home Thoughts: Watch Out Amazon! The iPad Might Just be a Kindle Killer

"“We took a close-up look at the budding e-Reader market and found the iPad is all but certain to have a transformational impact on it going forward. While a handful of e-Reader manufacturers - most prominently Amazon - clearly have a major head start, the survey findings show the iPad is poised to profoundly shake up this market,” explained Paul Carton, Director of Research at ChangeWave."

I for one hope that the iPad is able to put a good dent in Kindle's market. While I am not personally thrilled about the walled garden nature that the iPad offers, the Kindle really is no different. What is more important to me is that there are more large competitors in the ebook market. The problem I see with a single large distributor of ebooks, as convenient as it may be, is that that distributor would have a significant amount of say in what gets published. I recall hearing rumors of how Walmart, what was one of the largest CD distributors in the United States, could have lyrics or the content of CDs changed. Under the guise of being "family friendly" I can understand their rationale, but it means there's a controlling interest in what we are able to access. Sure, we have the Internet to access most anything we want, but when a publisher will only publish a certain version of an ebook because Amazon, or Apple, or whomever says so, I shudder.