[...] We are skeptical about the specific charge against Amazon—namely, that book prices will rise significantly once the company’s dominance is complete—but we are somewhat more sympathetic to the idea that Amazon might act as too powerful a gatekeeper for an important cultural industry, perhaps establishing its own proprietary format for digital content, as it has tried to do with Amazon Word (AZW), the format used on the Kindle reader. Free pricing of book chapters given away in the AZW format, for example, could be used as a Trojan horse, attracting readers as part of a long-term strategy leading to increased platform control and a shift from an open to a closed proprietary standard.