Will Amazon's Kindle Replace The Book? Pundits Say "Yes"

Saw this article over at The Daily Galaxy: Will Amazon's Kindle Replace The Book? Pundits Say "Yes". An excerpt:

The Kindle is the logical evolution of a 500-year-old analog technology that terrifies the $24 billion book-publishing industry already faint from Amazon's growing dominance.

The newspaper industry, says Russ Wilcox, an entrepreneur from Harvard Business School and founder of E Ink in a brilliant article in this week's New Yorker by Nicholson Baker
was a hundred-and-eighty-billion-dollar-a-year business, and book publishing was an additional eighty billion. Half of that was papermaking, ink mixing, printing, transport, inventory, and the warehousing of physical goods. “So you can save a hundred and thirty billion dollars a year if you move the information digitally,” Wilcox told Baker. “There’s a lot of hidden forces at work that are all combining to make this sort of a big tidal wave that’s coming.” The economic pressures are immense.”

On June 12th, Gizmodo announced that the Kindle DX, just started shipping on Amazon to extend it's e-book reach to include textbooks and periodicals, which it will test-market to college students.The DX was sold out before the end of the week. "Either people really love that DX, the Gizmodo team quipped, "or the Earth only produces enough resources to sustain manufacturing a few units at a time."

The Gizmodo report underscores the obvious fact that the Kindle has gripped the public imagination like it's, well, like it's a new iPod or iPhone release, The Kindle, now in it's second iteration, is the first book-industry hit of its kind, selling hundreds of thousands of units since its introduction in November 2007. It's the first with built-in wireless 3G connectivity, making it possible to download whole volumes in less than a minute -- more than 1,500 books can fit on a single machine -- with titles often less than half the price of a traditional hardcover.