The 30% Apple toll hits businesses like Amazon hard, because the margins on book sales are slim enough as it is.

Actually, it doesn’t hit Amazon at all, because they’re not using Apple’s in-app purchasing system, but please continue. The chair recognizes the overly dramatic Senator who doesn’t quite have his facts straight.

Because the HTML5 site is very close to the functionality of the iPad Kindle app, this is going to have huge ramifications for Apple. Yes, Apple’s walled garden has just been structurally weakened. I’d go as far as to say that it’s a matter of months, not years, before Amazon pulls its iOS Kindle app from the App Store.

(Emphasis MacManus’s.) Right, because what users love is difficult installation processes. They dig that. They crave it. Your average iPhone user hates the convenience of the App Store. What they really like is Web standards.

In order to understand why Apple’s walled garden is probably going to go the way of AOL’s walled garden from the dot com era, we first need to acknowledge the sophistication and promise of HTML5.