he told ya so

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos thinks he’s got a hit on his hands in the Kindle:

Is the Kindle about to catch fire?

Could Amazon.com’s seven-month-old wireless e-book reader - a rectangular wonder in antique iPod white, able to download any of 125,000 books adapted to its format - be the tipping point that marks the decline and fall of the paper book? …

The balding, blue-jeaned corporate dynamo - now a 44-year-old father of four who kept his empire healthy through the dot-com disasters - did everything possible to suggest the answers were an almost Joycean yes, yes, and yes again.

And he’s none too sad to see the end of publishing as we know it, or the back of publishers, either:

To Kindle doubters, Bezos got off one subtle jab about book-industry know-it-alls.

He recalled when he started his groundbreaking company 14 years ago. “The more you knew about the book industry,” he observed with a bright smile, “the less likely you were to invest in Amazon.”

This is true: the know-it-alls were in denial, and the book industry as we know it will change under the pressures of the new technology as more and more people will want this new gadget.

I predicted in December 2007, when it was released, that the Kindle would catch on. Sadly, I didn’t invest in Amazon (I wasn’t much of an investor, or I would have). But I know one wise man in publishing who bucked the trend and did—to the ridicule, and later the envy, of his colleagues.

That’s the way the cookie crumbles.