Amazon Can Empty Bookstore Shelves

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The efficiency of this system makes me think of what I wish the health-care industry would do to save everyone money and make the experience richer. I had my knee replaced last April. When I tried to reschedule a pre-surgery appointment with the doctor, they tried to make me do it in an office he only occupies two days a month just because that's where my X-rays resided. The X-rays were not, in 2007, available on a networked computer even though my doctor works out of three separate offices. Yikes.

A New Chapter

It's not hard to see how Kindle will take off. Business travelers, I predict, will be the first to embrace it. Having a device with multiple books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs to travel with, which also has a long battery life, beats wrangling a laptop, magazines, and papers in an airline seat. The next market will be university students, undergrad and grad. With such a nifty application and the tension over ridiculously high prices for textbooks, going digital is a brainy way to deliver textbooks to an audience that is already used to digital consumption.

Taking the e-book logic to obvious conclusions, think of the energy saved as we make this transition over the next, hopefully, two decades. The trees not cut down. The trucks not hauling books. The paper plants not stinking up riversides and bays. The Kindle is too smart an innovation not to succeed. Authors and readers will embrace it. Brick-and-mortar booksellers and publishing houses will have no choice but to play along.

If I was Barnes & Noble (BKS) or Borders (BGP), I would start planning for what I was going to put in all that store space in 20 years. At least I hope they have to have those meetings.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has demurred making too many comparisons between the Kindle and the iPod. And, of course, Amazon.com has to get the marketing, delivery, and application improvement right. But what he is doing is cracking open an egg that, in my opinion, has become increasingly ossified over the last 20 years. And what we find inside is a better world for reading and writing. It's one we always knew was there.