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This also assumes that Amazon never gives up the ghost and finds ways to make sideloading books onto Kindle more difficult than it currently is.

I've always been surprised that they haven't cracked down on it, given the relative ease with which you can circumvent the necessity of the Kindle store for the majority of popular titles. Simply load up Calibre, pop almost any file type into your library, and away you go. We're really living in the Limewire age for e-book piracy, even if we don't realize it.

My guess is, someone has run the math and figured out that it's better to keep people on a Kindle device and occasionally spending a few dollars, in exchange for the slow death of physical media and legitimate alternatives. When those become less readily available, then perhaps you can begin to boil the frog.

You can be sure I won't buy a kindle if I can't sideload onto it. I buy at least 5/6 new hardcover books a year from local independent retailers to support authors I like. I wish more authors would allow an e-book copy to be distributed with hardcovers they sell. Do what vinyl did.