Good to see he's realized that Apple won the war and our future is iPad this and iPad that.

Hey, anyone else love the new Nintendo 3DS - man, that's a freaky machine ...

I love my Sony ereader. it is without some of the bells and whistles (and accompanying bugs and noise) of the IPAD or kindle, but I am fine with that. I download the books to my laptop and sync it at the same time I do my IPOD every week. and at the same time it charges both machines.

I had the experience that makes me love the ebook just last week... watching the Colbert Report, listening to his interview with a writer, buying and downloading the book bbefore the interview is even over.Starting to read it after the show.

for a bookaholic like me, that is the best access to reading material ever.

if you're ultra-geek, having a cheaper and more powerful machine is always better.

But Apple is selling to consumers, which is why they have the cachet, which they don't hide under a bushel.

He's also totally incorrect. A well designed book is part of the reading experience (and you've certainly tried to read a poorly designed book and had to contend with the fact that its shortcomings inserted itself into the experience). It may vanish if that's the intent or it may be an integral part of the book (barring some major technical advance, I doubt there are going to be pop-up books available on any ereader any time soon). And on top of that, one the Kindle's biggest issues is that it doesn't correctly render the extant ebook standard thereby breaking the careful layout specified by the author or publisher for experiencing the work.

This isn't a zero sum game. If I-pad manages to create a larger market, then more publishers buy in. This eliminates Kindle's biggest problem: it's valuable mostly as a replacement for paper books, but for serious readers too many books are not available for the platform.

The physical book is "designed to disappear"?? By whom?? Not writers, not publishers, not Gutenberg.

What is wrong with Bezos? What a silly and unsupportable thing to say. Getting into the author's world is fine, but that book-disappearing thing is something he (or some marketers) just made up. I don't want to hear it again. Make up something better to say.

i do not want to hear it again!!!!!!

I wrote about the evolution of the 'book' a while back on my blog. I agree with Bezos that narrative is the 'core' we're dealing with here; but while I believe framing the issue as such is all about exploring the different options (e-book, multi-media, etc) and letting them flourish in their own unique ways beyond just the 'book' format, Bezos is essentially revealing his ultimate goal-- side-stepping the publishing industry and consigning these 'narratives' to the contractual morass of Amazon Inc.

The book will never disappear--it's currently the most secure, untraceable, private method of transmitting information, and you can hand-make a book (who out there can say the same for an e-reader? A Computer?)-- and I like what someone earlier said "this is not a zero-sum game". I'm sick of the technology media saying that something is an 'xx-killer'... If that was the case, why are there hundreds of styles of phones still in the world? Wasn't the iPhone supposed to 'kill' all other phones?

The "narrative is the book" for certain kinds of books. Not others. There's no surprise that the Kindle is changing the game for genre fiction and popular quick-reading stuff. It's the best thing that's ever happened to readers of romances.

But for readers of other kinds of books that need the supporting structure that a book offers -- index, notes, bibliography, page numbers, graphs -- the Kindle is proving to be useless. People were excited by the idea of textbooks on the Kindle, but that's turned out to be horribly unworkable.

People like Bezos, and Steve Jobs for that matter, who are not readers and not book people, are always coming out with this sort of starry-eyed "we're changing the way the world works" stuff. There's something about being a big tech CEO superstar that makes you unable to distinguish between your company's marketing and your own emotions, such as they are.

PS -- there has never been a valuable "multimedia book" -- one in which the whole is greater than the sum of its multi -- and there never will be.

All this could be solved by releasing paperback editions of all books within 3 weeks of first edition printings.

People hate heavy books that cost $30 but love nifty paperbacks that cost $5.

Will demonstrates that he hasn't bought a book in at least twenty years.