Introduction: Manjoo says " Fear the Kindle" and I wonder, should we?

I begin this blog with questions raised by Farhad Manjoo's essay: "Fear the Kindle: Amazon's amazing e-book reader is bad news for the publishing industry." Slate Posted Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009, at 5:14 PM ET

Manjoo's article raises the major questions that this blog will address. The crisis of news production created by the for profit economic model of newspapers may just be a harbinger of the future of book publishing. I don't want books to undergo the same curtailment that local, national, and international news reporting have. In the midst of this information revolution, we are on the verge of losing an infrastructure that has endured 500 years--that of book publishing. What does e-publishing offer us? Threaten?

Here Manjoo, book lover, discusses the Kindle (retail $359.00) that is new from Amazon. He says that it is really beautiful to use, that if you never thought that you could curl up with an electronic reading device, you would find yourself convinced by this machine, that it is a joy to use.

Manjoo then discusses issues of monopoly and copyright. He reports that Amazon will control the sales of all books and a good deal of other print material because the only way to use the Kindle is to buy the digital material compatible with it. The licensing that is part of the Amazon agreement vastly expands the reach of copyright because it limits the ability to lend and to resell books.

These resale and lending issues have already dramatically limited these sharing practices in music. Think of the court cases we have been discussing in the news discussion section of our class. But the Kindle and its licenses threatens to extend these restrictions to print matter.

Amazon’s monopoly would undermine the competition in the market place. It could become an almost single supplier for electronic printed matter--much as Microsoft is the monopoly holder in pc software.

Amazon may have no reason to publish new books, it makes the same, nay more money republishing. Traditional publishing houses receive much less of the revenue from the sales of books and so would progressively trim their operations.

Would this lead to less critical reading of new books, and less editing, in some ways creating a lack of incentive in the book business, thus leading to fewer and fewer books being published?

Something indeed to look into.