Books have been locked down—understandably—for centuries by the limitations of a printed book, and they've only now been flung open to yield incredible, open-ended possibilities. It might lead to an overall decline in the profitability of some institutions or bookstores. I don't have an answer to that. What I do know, from the perspective of a reader and as an author, is that there's a tremendous new opportunity to figure out what the book should be in this new kind of world.



What's encouraging is that the early new platforms—Kindle and iPad—are clearly leading to people buying more books. The data is in on that. Books are not going away; in fact, publications seem to be increasing and people are willing to pay money for them. And what we've seen in just the past four or five months has been this incredible arms race between the Kindle app and the iBook app; every month they're like—now we've got a dictionary app, now you can take notes, now you can share your notes. The bells and whistles around the text are constantly getting improved. One of the things that's fascinating about the Gutenberg era is how long it took them to invent the things we now take for granted. Gutenberg comes out with the book, and they figure out how to make an index 60 years later. They had 60 years of "You know, it would be really nice if we could look something up."

We're having comparable breakthroughs every six months now.