'Better than a physical book'? ... Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos with the Kindle reader. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP
The fate of paper books in the electronic age remains distinctly uncertain. It's hard to believe they're on the way out, but who would have imagined newspapers facing obsolescence 15 years ago? And of course the monks spending whole lifetimes illuminating manuscripts in the 14th century would not have seen William Caxton coming.
The vision of a future where e-books displace the dust-collecting relics on your shelves still seems pretty fanciful. But there was a very striking vote for Christmas in yesterday's Wall Street Journal from the plumpest turkey in bookselling, Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos. Although it's a relatively nuanced reflection, he does compare books to horses - as in the draw-ers of carriages before the arrival of motor vehicles. "You're not going to keep riding your horse to work just because you love your horse. It's our job to build something that is better than a physical book."
Whether he's on the money remains to be seen. And whether Amazon's much-trumpeted Kindle is better than a book is more than a little moot. But Bezos made his fortune by pioneering and e-commerce selling books in 1994, when the idea still seemed pretty speculative to the rest of us. He gives no indication of how we're expected to furnish our rooms in this strange new world.
