Remember back when Jeff Bezos said he was going to make Amazon.com a gateway – or maybe a portal – to the web and the world said, “What’s that?” Bezos’ point was that in the future, all anyone would need to know — from a hot chick in LA to a grandma where ever grandmas hang out these days — to do any sort of shopping on the web would be — www.Amazon.com

Since we purchase pretty much everything from diapers to lawn mowers and computers at Amazon these days, you’ve got to hand it to the guy. He’s a visionary. Seems he never was worried all that much about making money selling books. And he’s done it again with the Kindle.

It’s the sort of device every book-addicted early -adopter had to have the second it came out. The thought of carrying around hundreds of books, with more for the asking at the speed of bandwidth and the price of jelly beans was just too much to resist. Did they do right by those customers as they upgraded and improved the Kindle? Of course not. No one ever does. It’s the bane of the early adopter.

What Amazon did do is create an incredible inventory of ebooks on Amazon – currently outselling physical books – as well as in the accounts of every Kindle owner. Enter Apple and the iPad or Barnes & Noble and the Nook. Talk about non-starters. If my books are already on Amazon, for my Kindle, why am I going to diddle with those?

To close the deal, Bezos and Amazon gave away the Kindle App for free, thus allowing their avid reader customers to read their Amazon-purchased Kindle books on any device!

Analysts predict there will soon come a time when 90% of the ebooks read on any device will be read through the Kindle app.

What can I say except …

Bezos calls it again!