image Oprah’s all agog over the Kindle, now out of stock. But what will her fans think when they can’t enjoy Kindle-DRMed books on new devices that they buy in the future? A press release from the Consumer Electronics Association might offer some lessons for Oprah and Amazon:

“‘Gone are the days when consumers purchased a single type of content, to play on a single type of device, exclusively for dedicated audio listening,’ stated Steve Koenig, CEA’s director of industry analysis. ‘Successful manufacturers are using formats that allow them to stay in front of customers who are navigating across an array of content choices.'”

Yes, Amazon owns Mobipocket, but the company still has yet to port it over to the iPhone / iPod Touch—one of the fastest-growing platforms for e-books. Many more people are probably reading them on cellphones than on $359 Kindles. If the recession deepens, we may see a wider gap—to which the device-tied format lock-in will contribute.

image ePub, anyone? Without proprietary DRM? I wish Amazon all kinds of luck in starting a DRMless ePub store just like its laudable DRMless MP3 initiative. Do it, Jeff! Multidevice / multiapp is the future. Dedicated e-readers are great, despite limitations, but consumers don’t want their books tied to a particular gizmo or even just one vendor.

And speaking of ePub: Minus DRM of any kind, the ePub edition of my book The Solomon Scandals should most likely be online this week, along with the current advance promo files in the HTML and PDF. The paper version ships next month.

(News release found via mdash on Twitter.)

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