Amazon to unleash Kindle format to mobiles?

I just fin­ished record­ing a great dis­cus­sion for the soon-to-be-launched, if not long-awaited, Out­sourced­CMO show in which we not so much dis­sect, as gloss over, Amazon.com’s retail reign in spite of eco­nomic tur­moil. It’s an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion that spans the his­tory of online direct sell­ing, includ­ing the online cam­brian era in which the first macro­scopic retail­ers emerged from the boom/crash sludge, to the phanero­zoic era, in which abun­dant online retail life exists and many such life forms are try­ing to fig­ure out whether or not they should actu­ally kill one another.

I, for one, don’t think that they should. Kill one another, that is.

What­ever does this have to do with Ama­zon and the Kindle?

The Kin­dle is a bril­liant plat­form — right, I said it, it’s a plat­form — because it greases the skids on a whole cat­e­gory of prod­ucts that Ama­zon already owns out­right: books. They have boat­loads of them. They are known for books. They’ve been doing books for­ever. And other than Google, there is no other com­pany mak­ing such hay about mak­ing books avail­able elec­tron­i­cally. You can’t under­es­ti­mate this point: There is no cog­ni­tive leap required to go from think­ing about Ama­zon the book seller, to Ama­zon the ebook seller.

But, plat­form? Accord­ing to NYTimes, Ama­zon is work­ing on mak­ing the Kin­dle for­mat open to mobiles.

“We are excited to make Kin­dle books avail­able on a range of mobile phones,” said Drew Her­dener, a spokesman for Ama­zon. “We are work­ing on that now.”

If the Kin­dle ini­tia­tive was about chan­nel and plat­form devel­op­ment more than just unit sales, they suc­ceeded on many fronts. First, the device ain’t bad to hold and look at. Sec­ond, they throw in absolutely sexy always-on wire­less from Sprint bun­dled in the cost of the device. Third, they give you access to a mas­sive library of con­tent, includ­ing the web, with no real strings attached. It’s hard not to be sucked into the Kin­dle move­ment, even if you don’t actu­ally own a Kindle.

And there’s the rub. Open­ing up the plat­form to iPhone, Android, Black­Berry, and so on, sud­denly has greased the skids yet again, pro­vid­ing con­tent to devices Ama­zon no longer has to sup­port. Will Kin­dle on iPhone kill the Kin­dle device? Prob­a­bly not, but who cares? Ama­zon has already won on the platform.