I do not believe that any other e-book seller has the selection that Amazon does. It would be terribly embarrassing if some seller tried to use this for PR and then realized that they do not have some of the titles.
Really? From a "rest of the world" point of view (I am speaking for France where Amazon is now officially selling kindles and kindle books, but it is also true for Germany), it is more the contrary: Amazon has the smallest selection of e-books compared to the other generalist e-book sellers.
I don't really subscribe to your argument in a cloud-based market where - to me - the biggest looming threat is to lose access to all your data.
There was another incident (Amazon again) where they lost a person's annotations for the Jobs biography in a software update[1]. Amazon seem to be botching the cloud aspect of e-books, and while their selection is orders of magnitude better than iBooks in my country (because I can buy from Amazon.com), the reason I buy e-books in the first place is because of what the cloud offers - with marginalia/annotations being the best selling point over dead-tree books.
Annotating e-books on the Kindle app on iOS is also a ridiculous pain in the ass, but that's for another time. I love the selection Amazon has, especially the self-published articles from bloggers, Ars Technica, newspapers or magazines and such, but the way Apple keeps screwing these things up, I plan on choosing the iBooks version, if available. I honestly think I might have thrown my phone against the wall, if all my Isaacson biography annotations had been wiped.
But that's just me as one customer. I am sure that some people have the priorities you do, but I wouldn't exactly predict an unequivocal PR failure. :)
