While Bezos does not see physical books disappearing anytime soon, he sees a certain inevitability to their eclipse.
Many have predicted the eventual demise of physical books, as e-book readers and e-book demand soars.
My guess is that it's because the process of reading physical books isn't seen as part of IT.
But fears they would kill off physical books have so far proved exaggerated.
"The biggest thing that a publisher provides is the ability to put physical books on bookstore shelves, " Shatzkin says.
After all, Amazon had been deeply discounting physical books for years, threatening brick-and-mortar shops of all sizes with its deep pockets.
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This is as true of e-books as it is of physical books.
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This not only built customer enthusiasm for the Kindle and e-books, but helped crush online and offline competitors that were selling physical books.
And of course, there will always be physical books, but probably not as many stores or stores quite as large as the current ones.
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At the same time, there are fewer bookstores in which to sell physical books, highlighted by the liquidation last year of Borders Group Inc.
For publishers, digital-book revenue is still the fastest-growing segment of the business at a time when the sale of physical books is in decline.
They are, after all, simply delivery mechanisms for those physical books.
Physical books made money, and parents seemed like they were magic.
Data collected on the sales of physical books records around 90-95% of all consumer sales in the UK, but is less robust for the e-book market.
For the library exists to provide those physical books: it comes to us from a time when the publication of a book was an expensive business.
It launched Tuesday in Apple's App Store and is from MyPublisher, the first company to create affordable custom physical books from digital images, back in 1994.
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The value of the UK's physical books market fell by nearly 5% over the course of 2012 in value terms, according to market researchers at Nielsen Bookscan.
More than 90% of sales still come from physical books.
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And, Kindle owners continue to buy physical books as well.
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Amazon was altering the perceived value of e-books just as it had with physical books, and this particular demonstration of predatory behavior worried publishers for a couple of reasons.
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More recently, the firm leveraged its market leadership in selling physical books online to become the dominant vendor of e-readers, leaving potential rivals such as Sony unable to gain much traction.
They also point out that new technologies such as print on demand, which makes printing short runs of physical books more economical, should help them squeeze more money out of the old-fashioned format.
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Does this create enough synergy between selling e-books (the Nook business, which would go one way) and the selling of physical books that it would be crazy to run two separate sites after a split?
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Quite: my own opinion is that, probably around the time of the death of my own generation which grew up only with physical books, the library and the bookshop will be as dead as those physical books.
The space for physical books has decreased.
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When I was growing up, the kind of people who today are lamenting the decline of physical books in the face of e-reading were busy bemoaning the decline of independent bookstores in the face of ruthless national chains.
David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, sat down with AllThingsD's Peter Kafka to kick off Day 2 of D:Dive Into Media here in Dana Point, California, with the interview centering on Carey's take on how digital magazines are working out in a world that seems less and less intrigued by physical books.
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The one that was losing at audit because he had two sets of books (yes, actually two physical sets of books) and kept getting confused?
Publishers have an incentive to work with a retailer that can put high-margin "backlist" books on physical display.
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