I just noticed the Amazon Kindle on the home page.

I know this has been talked about for some time and its release is coinciding with Christmas but what are the far reaching implications?

Will this affect "New book" sales? Or "Used Book" sales?

Those are the obvious questions I'm sure we're all thinking about.

But what about how our children will read from here on? Will it be all electronic all the time for convenience reasons? Will this device become the new textbook for our grandchildren?

Only 10 ounces and can hold 200 books without any memory upgrades. Can read a large "War & Peace" book on one charge.

Can deliver your newspaper automatically early every morning or let you visit blogs.

Will this type of device hurt our paper industry??

Hmmmmm

So many questions to ponder

What are your thoughts for the future of this device....and the imitators that are sure to follow.

Happy Book Peddling

Kyle

I saw them demonstrate it on GMA this morning.  I was impressed because it actually looks like it has the feel of a real book.  I liked the fact that you can enlarge the font.  As a senior citizen, I long for the days when I could just pick up a book and read without having to hunt down my reading glasses.  However, it's a bit too pricey for me.  I'm not worried about it having an impact on my sales as I don't have that many "new" best sellers in my inventory.  Down the road, I think that is where the impact will be felt.

Renee

This sort of thing always reminds me of the movie A Boy and His Dog. the boy had a collection of cassette looking things that supposedly contained vast stores of knowledge. problem was the devices to read the casettes were disabled.

I think ebooks and paper books will co-exist. there seems to be a place for both imho.

enough of "hurting" the paper industry

If you like to breathe you should like trees.

Here it is, one for the enviornment:

Use this for NEWSPAPERS, NOT BOOKS.

Save on delivery, slaughtering forests for informationthat only lasts 1 DAY

You plug your phone or cel - download the paper, save artilces print coupons

Then same thing next day, saves trees saves gas - creates unemploymnet - they can work in another part of the print industry.

They do this already - it's been going on for many years I've worked with many of them - a lot of them, about 90% call themselves authors cause they self publish - if you read the books/stories - they WANT to be authors - going through traditional publishing houses and editors and publicists they get the education to be an author

2 major publishing houses have already scrapped E-publishing

I think this will have very little effect

"2 major publishing houses have already scrapped E-publishing"        

That will probably prove to have been incredibly short-sighted.

Jim

I read War and Peace on a Palm I bought in 2002. Worked fine for me.