How the Kindle Could Kill Book Publishing

With the Kindle, Amazon's Jeff Bezos may be poised “ to do to book publishers what Steve Jobs did to the music industry,” writes Adam Penenberg in Fast Company: rapidly create a market from nothing and use it to rule over publishers with an iron fist, perhaps even “phasing them out completely.” Amazon’s e-book revenue should reach $1.2 billion by next year, an analyst says, but to rule, Bezos needs to "nail down distribution of e-books, turn them into a mass-market phenomenon," and set e-book prices low enough—and Apple could spell trouble.

Apple has been rumored to be working on an e-reader, and the black-and-white Kindle could easily lose out to a snazzy, color multimedia tablet. That could be good news for publishers: It would create competition—and unlike Amazon, Apple doesn’t want “to usurp the publishers' role or to control content," Penenberg writes. "Suddenly, the hunter becomes the hunted, and if e-books take off, Amazon could find itself the odd man out."
(More Amazon stories.)