Apolo­gies to read­ers for mis­quot­ing a Billy Joel song title. And the ter­ri­ble pun.

My friend, Kate Car­ruthers has an inter­est­ing post about sit­ting next to an elderly gen­tle­man on a recent flight and hear­ing his views on the change the Ama­zon Kin­dle is bring­ing to the book pub­lish­ing industry.

As a Kin­dle owner of just a month, I con­sider the device trans­for­ma­tive in its mar­ket seg­ment. Let’s not fool our­selves into think­ing the Kin­dle is the first device of its kind — we’ve had ebook read­ers of one form or another for quite some time now. But it’s the first to make a dif­fer­ence in the pub­lic mind.

What I do believe is that with now-​​global avail­abil­ity of both the Kin­dle 2 and the larger-​​format Kin­dle DX, the book pub­lish­ing indus­try is fac­ing a water­shed moment. It’s a moment of no lesser trans­for­ma­tion than that the music indus­try has faced with the dom­i­nant emer­gence of the iPod and the iTunes Store. Again, Apple didn’t invent the elec­tronic music player nor sell­ing music online, they sim­ply had the smarts to define it. And I think Ama­zon has likely done the same thing with the Kindle.

As a device, it’s triv­ial to use. The inter­face is incred­i­bly easy, and the smarts built into the OS such as the way the Menu but­ton reveals an in-​​context set of activ­i­ties based on what you are doing (read­ing, brows­ing titles in your library, look­ing at the Kin­dle store, etc), make device usabil­ity very good. It’s not per­fect, but it is close.

On top of the actual usage expe­ri­ence, the ease with which the device allows you to access your library (from mul­ti­ple devices) as well as wide avail­abil­ity of titles, makes obtain­ing new and inter­est­ing read­ing a triv­ial task (as with the iTunes Store for music). It’s also poten­tially expen­sive, as the pur­chase hur­dle is now near-​​zero.

Lastly, the usage expe­ri­ence is plea­sur­able. The Kin­dle is easy to read on. It’s as clear as a book and the elec­tronic ink the screen uses is much eas­ier on the eye than an LCD screen.

I don’t think the Kin­dle is yet in a posi­tion to sup­plant paper books. Not even for a tech early adopter like me. Books, and the tac­tile please to be realised by hold­ing one and read­ing it, curled in a lounge chair, isn’t under threat from the Kin­dle. Nor is every book pub­lished on the plat­form yet.

But it is a tan­gi­ble threat to book pub­lish­ing. I believe it will trans­form the retail end of the pub­lish­ing indus­try, though I don’t yet under­stand how. And, with Ama­zon open­ing the plat­form to devel­op­ers, there are poten­tially fur­ther as yet unseen benefits.