Being in the Kindle conversion and formatting business, one of the advantages of having such a simple format was that self-published authors can create books that look just like those from major publishing houses. There's only so much you can do to make something fancy with the current Kindle format. With more capabilities, we'll likely see people try and do 'fancy' and end up with stuff that's actually not that great looking.

The wording of the text regarding 'older readers' is also a bit confusing. Will material created for KF8 be 'automatically translated'? Will the tools output two different formats? I'm curious to see the details.

I guess I'll need to order a Fire though, in order to keep up... I was a bit ambivalent, as I'm not wild about not having the Google stuff, and about the Android fork of an older version.

The good stuff: table support currently sucks, and the ability to do a bit more with the formatting will help with things like manuals or textbooks, that currently don't always work well on the Kindle.

I am worried, though, that for many people, it will be "enough rope to hang themselves with".