Osnos: Kindle Points to Our Digital Future

TeleRead continues to lead the pack in coverage of Amazon.com‘s Kindle with a guest essay from Peter Osnos (which first appeared on his own website Tuesday). Osnos, the founder of PublicAffairs and current director of The Caravan Project (which strives to make quality nonfiction available on multiple platforms simultaneously), says “te device is easy to use and the reading experience is routinely smooth,” and he also believes that once he gets the hang of converting PDF and Word documents to Kindle-ready formats, manuscript review is going to be a much different experience.

“So what does Kindle mean for the rest of the book business?” he asks, fully aware that “Amazon… serves a relatively small part of the book buying market, between 10 and 15 percent at last count.” He thinks it might just be the tipping point that convinces other booksellers that it’s time to accept the e-book as readily as the print and audio formats. “A year from now,” he predicts, “digital delivery of books will almost certainly be an accomplished fact with wholesalers, at least one national chain, and many of the largest commercial publishers, offering customers multi-platform books.”

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