Take That, Steve Jobs! Future of Publishing In Past

By now most people who follow technology have heard about Steve Jobs famous dismissal of the Kindle, quoted below:

Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Full article here:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/the-passion-of-steve-jobs/

But, he doesn’t seem to be aware of the other 60%, who apparently do read:

But here’s one very important statistic: According to Nielsen, books remain the number one selling item on the Internet. 875 million consumers have shopped online; 41% of them have bought books. While online hasn’t been as kind to magazines, the boon to book sales can be summed up in one word: Amazon (AMZN). Meanwhile, company executives continue to insist that supplies of Kindle — the iPod of books — are far outpacing demand. Sure, no one’s actually seen one of these high-tech devices in real life, but numbers don’t lie.

The above passage is excerpted from an article appearing on the site Minyanville, “A Creative Education and Entertainment Community”. You can find the complete article here:

http://www.minyanville.com/articles/AMZN-BGP-BKS-APPL/index/a/16058

The piece concludes with a somewhat ominous comparison:

Are we ready to give up the great tangible quality of our books? What’s that you say? CD? Never heard of it.