Personal anecdotes incoming:<p>I live in a Japanese apartment.  Like many Japanese folks, I read a lot and cannot possibly keep all the books I read here.  Most go in the garbage when I'm done.  I have no particular desire for ownership but, if I did, I own the bits on my Kindle in a much more durable fashion than I own the atoms in my trash bag right now.  (Thirty volumes just got evicted.)<p><i>It seems to me in theory every author could put their books on a web site right now, using whatever payment system he likes.</i><p>This has been true in ten of the last ten years, and I have never bought a single book through it.  The experience matters, and the Kindle is an <i>amazingly</i> better experience for me than reading on my screen is.  (Amazon also beats the stuffings out of Google for book discovery, which is what I'd have to do to get to your website if you sold it directly.  I can't very well Google [sci-fi I would enjoy], but Amazon will give me four titles fitting that bill on my front page.  And they're pretty good at it, too -- Amazon probably has a better handle on my tastes than anybody except my siblings.)