In related albeit slightly older news:

Amazon to be stripped of tax advantage on sale of ebooks
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/201…
European commission tells Luxembourg to end VAT loophole, a decision that could close the gap with British ebook prices

I'm not sure what it means, but I bought the Kindle ebook "Making Things See" by Greg Borenstein -- a Kinect programming guide. (https://kindle.amazon.com/work/making-th… )

In the book was link to a "special offer". The offer was from the publisher who would sell me the unlocked PDF version of the book for $5 more! Basically it subverts the Amazon ownership and management of the ebook and lets me get the license direct from the publisher.

I have to think that this is worrisome for Amazon who are not publishers of note, but distributors. Which is all well and good when you are actually doing something like stacking boxes in warehouses and mailing stuff -- but not good if you're just reposting a set of bytes. No value added there! It could just be a matter of time before publishers finally figure out -- hey, let's build a website that people can search with Google for our books.