In a presentation at the Digital Book World conference in New York today, author/futurist David Houle shed some perspective on where the publishing industry is today, compared to its place in history.

“There were more books published this week than there were in all of 1950,” he said. Houle told the room full of publishers that the physical book had a great run as an artifact, but encouraged them to embrace the current era of digital publishing to pave the way for future generations.

Houle was followed on stage by Russ Grandinetti, VP of Kindle Content at Amazon, who shared that while physical book sales are still going strong at Amazon, Kindle book sales have passed print. Grandinetti went on to say that while eInk is good, the company’s new tablet, the Kindle Fire makes for a better reading experience for kids books, comics and cookbooks. He shared that Kindle Fire owners buy almost three times more children’s books eInk Kindle owners.

Grandinetti also used his presentation to encourage publishers to allow sharing for their books. He correlated that books that are shared among readers have higher sales.