[CraigInOregon]

At the present time, Amazon only sells kindle books. Amazon is missing out on a large market since Nook, Kobo, and the other e-readers read epub and can't read the Kindle format.

The most logical thing for Amazon to do is to start selling epub books too. That would be welcome news to us Indie authors since it would make more sales for us.

So do expect Amazon to start selling epub books?

This topic shows up 2-3 times a month, like clockwork.

1) Amazon's not "missing out" on a market. That's a misnomer. Amazon defined their market by choosing .mobi and currently control 65-70 percent of the entire ebook market.

2) Even if Amazon offered .ePub as an alternate format, that does not mean that their .ePub files would work on Nook, Kobo, etc. There's more to it than .ePub. There's being an approved vendor, and BN.com, Kobo, etc. are competitors with Amazon, so they're not going to approve Amazon as a vendor. And it's not something Amazon is interested in.

3) The closest you'll get to this being a reality is this: The Nook Color is an Android Tablet. With a couple easy-to-find hacks, you can access the full Android Market on a Nook Color. Once you do this, you can side-load the Kindle for Android app onto a Nook Color, and access all your Amazon books on a Nook Color in this way... though it's a hack and you basically void your warranty when you do this (though there are safeguards and workarounds to that, if you know your Android stuff).

4) If Amazon launches a Kindle-compatible Android tablet, as is widely believed that they will, one would likely eventually be able to hack Amazon's tablet, install Nook for Android on it, and do likewise. But that's not possible on current Kindles.

That's about the size of it.

So even if Amazon starts selling ePub documents, that will not mean you can load your books on a Nook or Kobo device. Sorry. It's just more complex than that.