Amazon's Jeff Bezos: eBooks Will Replace Physical Books (Kindled Editions and eReaders, Too?)

Newsweek's Daniel Lyons interviewed Amazon's Jeff Bezos about the Kindle, how the Apple tablet might affect it, and the next phase of digital distribution. Here's a snip from The Customer Is Always Right:

Lyons: Do you think that the ink-on-paper book will eventually go away?

Bezos: I do. I don't know how long it will take. You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world. That's not going to go away; that's going to thrive. But the physical book really has had a 500-year run. It's probably the most successful technology ever. It's hard to come up with things that have had a longer run. If Gutenberg were alive today, he would recognize the physical book and know how to operate it immediately. Given how much change there has been everywhere else, what's remarkable is how stable the book has been for so long. But no technology, not even one as elegant as the book, lasts forever.

LC's Digitizing American Imprints. Luckily that doesn't mean Kindle will necessarily be the primary mode of digital distribution (or Google Books for that matter). Nearly 60,000 American history books have been scanned as part of the first-ever mass book-digitization project of the Library of Congress. Many of the scanned books in LC's Digitizing American Imprints were published between 1865–1922. The oldest work dates to 1707. These and the other digitized books can be accessed through LC's online catalog and the Internet Archive. Details here.

What If Google Made Very Low Cost Touchscreen Web Tablets? "We can stop talking about eReaders," if Google would offer low cost touchscreen web tablets writes Jason Wilson in Why 2010 is going to be fun, citing to Brian Lam's Why Google Should Make a Tablet who writes:

The Most Direct Way To Get People Online is the Physical Manifestation of a Browser: And if Google wants more people on the web, a low cost, ad subsidized web tablet is probably the least complicated way to do it from a hardware, software and business partner standpoint. There's no competing operating system with native apps competing for attention with Google's web services, and there's not necessarily a need for a contract or carrier as on smartphones. This web tablet is a straight shot to the web. (I know its cheaper to let other hardware makers solve this puzzle, but android is just as confusing of a model.)

Software Is the Issue, and They've Already Got It Figured Out: Chrome OS is the perfect operating system for a web tablet. It's a fast operating system that's completely browser centric. While Tablet hardware is somewhat a commodity (Exception: touchscreens of the size used in JooJoo aren't super cheap yet), the big issue is software. And Chrome OS is ripe for a web surfing tablet.

[JH]