by Larry Nocella

Created on: March 03, 2009

Despite my natural tendency to question everything, some days I just want to believe the hype. Skepticism gets tiring in the land of relentless advertising, but enhances the thrill of discovery when something I think is going to suck ends up winning me over.

So I come to you preaching with the zeal of the newly converted: the recently released Amazon Kindle 2 is really cool.

If you don't know, the Kindle is an eBook reader, but much more importantly, it's a travelling book store, and that's where it scores book-buying's 2001 Monolith Moment, evolving the process a significant step. While not every book in the world is eBook-compatible yet, someday they will be. When that day comes, if you want, you can clear off your shelves, recycle every paper book you own, and keep just your book-reading device.

Obviously, being a semi-pro writer (heavier on the semi than on the pro) I'm very interested in how books are purchased, and how writing is marketed. However, unlike most of my writing colleagues, I'm not resistant to technology, believing it will be the end of good writing. I think mediums will always change, but they will always need writers to fill them. On the surface, eBooks sound bad. It sounds like books are going away, but they're not. Only their format is changing.

That's good news, because change is something the publishing world needs desperately. Before the internet, before print-on-demand self-publishing, books had to be filtered through the self-anointed priesthood of New York City literati and their hugely wasteful forecast-and-recycle model (they guess how many they are going to sell, or purposefully overestimate to build hype, and then recycle what doesn't sell.) That method is about as inefficient as you can get.

Environmentally speaking, forecast-and-recycle has been improved with the print-on-demand model, where printing technology allows a single book to be printed at a time, so only as many books as are wanted are printed.

The Kindle moves book-making even further: no books are printed at all. This is where the short-sighted residents of Status Quo go into full-blown panic mode. "The barbarians are crashing the gate!" They cry. As usual, that warning is code for, "Our elite little club is no longer elite! Anyone can get in!" As for me, I say rock on, democracy.

People in the supposed know have been bitching about how internet technology is making people dumber and meaner. One recent example of this hysteria is the perplexingly popular yet uninsightful

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