Credit where credit is due:

Even before the digital age made the creation of books a breeze, the cost of actually publishing them (on paper) had trended down.

In the late 80s (or so) Robert Haft went on the radio and TV with a squeaky voice and announced that "books cost too much", and soon small books stores were being replaced (on the east coast at least) with the (at the time) mega stores known as Crown Books. Then came Borders, then came Barnes and Noble, each new iteration making the previous ones seem small.

All along the way there was hate. As the sheer number of books being published made it more possible than ever for anyone to become an author, people decried the disappearance of the small book stores with whatever advantages (mostly imaginary) people wanted to attribute to them.

But even these mega stores were only an intermediary step to what we have now, almost universal access online to anything that has ever been printed, delivered to your door the next day if you wish.

Historically, I give Crown credit for inventing the BIG bookstore, and Amazon for taking the idea online.

I don't know about Mr. Pellegrino, but there are a lot of people calling themselves authors now that would not be (whether they were financially successful at it or not) had it not been for these revolutions.

As Barnes and Noble did not conceive the BIG bookstore, they just improved on the concept, so too Apple did not invent the downloadable MP3 file, they just made it easier and more universal.

Neither Apple nor Amazon invented the e-book reader and the idea that books, or book-like things could be "published" entirely electronically is so commonplace that we would have trouble figuring out who to give credit for it.

My analogy is this: in the future, being an author (or journalist) will be a lot like playing the guitar has been. Every teenager who has the least interest will know how to do it and own the requisite tools. For every good guitar player there will be thousands, or millions, of mediocre ones. For every great guitar player there will be thousands of good ones who perform publicly, but must also keep a day job.

There will be no one company controlling all this. Like Kodak, print publishers will vanish into obscurity, not because they failed to invent something, but because they failed to adopt, in a reasonable timeframe, inventions staring them right in the face.

Never before was the cliche more appropriate: Read it and weep.

Amazon is certainly guilty of ham handedness. But for some of the other players, this whole thing is starting to smell like a publicity stunt. If the Apple device is so great (a view I disagree with) then who cares what Amazon does? Would you rather go back to depending on the New York Times best seller list to decide what to read? Not me. I'd rather have a multiplicity of sources for reading ideas, and a multiplicity of ideas for what form to buy the content in and a multiplicity of sources from which to buy it. Let's celebrate the choices we have and let those who wish to be Kodak in this day and age reap the fruits of their "efforts".

Sapientia:

I couldn't let the historical errors pass...

Xerox would be more appropriate as the inventor of the GUI, and the mouse. Apple certainly helped popularize both. I'm pretty sure MP3 players were out for a while before the first iPod. Again Apple is popularizer, not inventor.

As to product comparisons, I use and like Apple computers, but I am not an Apple "fan". But I'm not an Amazon fan either.

I own a Kindle, but I'll be quite willing to switch to something better when it comes along. I see a lot of misleading information in the press though , apparently be people who have used neither...

First, the Kindle has a 10 day battery life, not 10 hours as the Apple device does. Current technology has yet to product the "perfect" display. Factors that must be balanced are color, visibility in various light conditions, and power consumption. The Kindle uses a black and white display not as just a compromise, but because it uses less power (far less) and can be read in full sun. By contrast the Apple device as most cell phones, have a color display that doesn't work well in bright light, and gulps power. What percentage of pages of today's books are in color? Vanishingly small.

There will be many things for which the iPod will be useful OTHER than reading books. There is no doubt it will be a hit among gadget freaks (of which am one). But until some revolution in display technology comes along the Kindle display is one of it's strongest selling points. The Kindle also has a fairly usable keyboard (not for touch typing of course) and it has the same sort of CPU used by many smart phones, and a Unix based operating system. It is a mystery to me why Amazon hasn't made the Kindle into a more multi-function device, and with the iPad coming out it may be too late for them to do so. Still I wouldn't mind a formal e-mail interface, a calendar, a calculator and a few other handy tools on the Kindle. The technology is there, just not the blessing from Amazon to use it.

As even Bill Gates knew when he named his company, it's the software that is important, the hardware less so. Yet so many companies attempt to lock users into a single device as if to ignore that deep down inside these devices are all made from well understood generic components. Even Apple's "new" chip is but a variation on something else. We may have to wait for the current crop of company founders to die off before this proclivity to "lock-in" users to a particular platform dies with them. The visionaries are anything but.