JEFF BEZOS, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, destination for nearly four-fifths of online book buyers, appears harmless. But to some in the publishing industry, he looms like a recurring nightmare. Having upset booksellers' apple-carts in the 1990s with his online stores, he is now widening his assault on the industry, as he personably explained in a speech at Book Expo America (BEA), a trade fair in Los Angeles, on May 30th.

AP

You're all doomed!

From the outside, book publishing looks like an impregnable edifice: 411,000 new titles were published in America last year, and more than 3 billion books sold there. Growth was 4.3% in the “adult trade” segment, the mainstay of the market. In fact, the existing order is fragile. Reading in America, as in many rich countries, is down. A study by the National Endowment for the Arts, an independent federal agency, says leisure reading is declining, especially among the young. Since 1985, books' share of entertainment spending has fallen by seven percentage points.

Books have changed very little in half a millennium, but they may now be on the verge of going digital. The first high-resolution e-book reader, made by Sony, came out in 2004. Last November Amazon launched the Kindle (pictured), a $359 e-book reader with a high-speed wireless link to the firm's online store, allowing e-books to be downloaded in seconds. Mr Bezos says Kindle e-books now account for 6% of sales of the 125,000 titles available in both print and electronic formats.

Though they are an improvement on a computer screen, e-book readers remain crude simulacra of books. A poll released by John Zogby at BEA found that 82% of Americans strongly prefer paper to pixels. None of the handful of e-book manufacturers will divulge sales figures. First-quarter sales of mass-market e-books in America have tripled since the same period in 2005, but they were worth just $10m.

But Kindle and its kind are merely the first generation of a product that is sure to evolve quickly in the coming years. Eventually, e-books point the way towards a cleavage of content from platform, threatening publishing with the wholesale change that has hit the music industry. It is a familiar story: fearing piracy, publishers are already adopting various mutually incompatible security technologies that are sure to annoy readers—although ePub, a new standard backed by many big publishers, may clarify things.

Unlike digital music or video, digital books require consumers to change their consumption habits. In some categories, such as textbooks, digital books are growing rapidly. As well as reducing costs by eliminating printing, warehousing, shipping and returns, this transformation could help publishers such as Elsevier and Springer recapture America's $2.3 billion college textbook-resale market.

Although e-books may one day transform the industry, another new technology that is less visible to readers is already making itself felt. Print on Demand (POD), which allows books to be printed and bound to order, is making millions of books available even if they appeal to only a narrow readership. Here, too, academia leads the way. Stephen DeForge of Ames On-Demand says his POD business, which specialises in printing small runs of customised books for schools and universities, has been growing by 45% a year since 2001. Last year his firm printed more than 800,000 books in runs as small as ten copies at a time.

The opportunity has not been lost on Mr Bezos. In March Amazon announced that it would require all the POD books it sells to be printed by the company at its warehouses. Mr Bezos says that this enables Amazon to have a book ready to ship within two hours of an order being placed online. Between POD and the Kindle, Mr Bezos thinks he can sell “any book ever printed in any language”. But printers and distributors, like booksellers before them, fear the oncoming Amazon juggernaut.

Technology is also opening up new formats. Serialisation is making a comeback: a firm called DailyLit divides e-books into small chunks for drip-feeding by e-mail. Harlequin, a Canadian publisher of romantic fiction, sells short-fiction e-books for reading on PCs or other devices in a lunch hour. Last autumn the firm, which sells around 130m books a year, became the first big publisher to offer its entire catalogue in both printed and digital formats. Brent Lewis, who runs Harlequin's digital business, says his firm's digital readership is composed of the same middle-aged women who read its printed books.

An economic slowdown may play to the new technologies' strengths. The costs of printing and shipping paper and cardboard are rising. Mr DeForge says POD is now cheaper than standard printing for runs of fewer than 1,200 copies, and the threshold is rising quickly. And if consumers become more price-sensitive, e-books may become more appealing. This week's Kindle bestseller, a political memoir by Scott McClellan, a former White House spokesman, can be downloaded from thin air in less than a minute for $9.99. A paper copy costs $15.37 on Amazon's website, and will not be in stock for three weeks.

Publishing has only two indispensable participants: authors and readers. As with music, any technology that brings these two groups closer makes the whole industry more efficient—but hurts those who benefit from the distance between them.