Here’s a slightly edited excerpt from an e-mailing by Peter Osnos, ex-Washington Post reporter, founder of PublicAffairs Books, and a commentator for the Century Foundation: The emergence of digital books will be a significant factor in the future of book sales. Last week, Barnes & Noble announced it would have an e-reading device in stores for the holiday season, and Amazon again dropped the price of its standard Kindle. Forester Research predicts total sales for e-book devices will be three million units in 2009 and double that in 2010. Most remarkable of all, Amazon...

Books: The Next Chapter August 11, 2009 Four summers ago, pondering a way to define how publishers could take advantage of emerging technologies for delivering information in a variety of formats, I came up with this slogan: Good Books. Any Way You Want Them. Now. The point was that books, basically unchanged in centuries as handheld objects composed of printed pages and covers, needed to adapt to the growing importance of screens, mobile devices, earphones, and the sense among readers that they should be able to get whatever they want on demand instead of searching for it. Supported by the MacArthur and Carnegie...

In elections, it is (usually) safe to project from expert exit polling what the final results will be. Something like that is happening with the still early numbers for the sales and use of Amazon's Kindle e-reader. It looks like a winner. Since its launch in November 2007, and despite being out of stock for long stretches, about a million units of the two versions have been sold, according to the best estimates I've seen, barely more than a dent in the gadget marketplace. Yet, I am consistently surprised at how many people I encounter who are enthusiastic...

In mid-twentieth century America, as more and more people graduated from high school and college, an array of means were devised to meet their demand for continued ”self-improvement” of the brain. This was the heyday of what author Alex Beam calls “salubrious intellectual diversions finding favor with the middle class.” Middlebrow favorites: Newsweeklies, Saturday Review and Playhouse 90 From coast-to-coast, there were magazines (Time, Newsweek, and the Saturday Review of Literature, among others), the Book of the Month Club, cultural coverage in newspapers and on television, classy programs such as the arts review...

Moderator's note: For another perspective---on the economics of the iPhone platform, which some see as a Kindle rival for e-publishing---check out Bill Janssen's essay. - D.R. It may not be everybody’s idea of summer reading, but I am engrossed in Michael Dobbs’s One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (Knopf). After reading excellent reviews in the New York Times and the Washington Post, I flipped the switch on my Amazon Kindle, and within a minute for $9.99, the book was mine to read at leisure. ...

One of the most persistent explanations for journalism's present financial troubles is that consumers no longer have to pay for news. The notion that everything these days is "free" on the Web is an article of faith—which happens to be wrong. Listening to a prominent newspaper editor make the "free" point the other day to a group of mostly nodding (and eminent) figures in the media world, I realized that a cri de coeur (an impassioned outcry of protest) is increasingly necessary. There is a great deal of money being generated by the transmission of news, but very little...

Moderator's note: I've added the chart from Journalism.org, where you can go for a better look at it. - D.R. In politics, "elitist" is now an epithet, surpassing even "liberal" as a description to be shunned. In the media, however, the "elitist" sector is doing better than most of the mass purveyors of news: the networks, news magazines, and the metropolitan newspapers that flourished so long as all things to all people. Three leading elite publications come to mind, the Economist, the Financial Times, and the New Yorker. All of them are financially strong, albeit in the case...

On March 24, George Soros delivered a finished manuscript by e-mail to PublicAffairs, his publisher, where I am founder and editor-at-large. Soros had concluded that the current turmoil is "the worst financial crisis since the 1930s." He wanted his analysis, titled The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, available immediately. Ten days later, on April 3, having been through the full range of publishing procedures-copy-editing, design, proofreading, and so on-the book was offered for sale, exclusively as an e-book. It was available through every major Web retailer, including Amazon's Kindle, Sony's Reader, booksense.com (which serves independent booksellers), and Overdrive...

Moderator's note: Peter Osnos is founder and editor-at-large of PublicAffairs Books and executive director of the Caravan Project, funded by the MacArthur and Carnegie Foundations. - D.R. How soon until Apple, too, gets serious about e-books? People are already enjoying them on the iPhone, whether Steve Job is ready or not. Watch jkOnTheRun's demo of TextOnPhone. - D.R. A unifying fact has now emerged among the dizzying changes in the ways we access information and entertainment. It is increasingly provided on demand, delivered on a screen or digital device when you hit the key or push the button. People...

Moderator's note: See Amazon customers' opinions on the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal editions of the Kindle. - D.R. The other morning, when the New York Times had not arrived by 8:00 a.m. (which, I should add, is very rare), I decided to try reading the paper on my Kindle, the Amazon digital reader. Settled into an armchair, I bought the paper for $0.75 and it downloaded, through wireless, in seconds. It could not have been easier. I purchased the Kindle when it was released last fall and have now read David Halberstam's The Coldest...

Moderator's note: Peter Osnos is founder and editor-at-large of PublicAffairs Books and executive director of the Caravan Project. Caravan, funded by the MacArthur and Carnegie Foundations, aims to help brick-and-mortar bookstores make books available in various digital and paper formats. Newsweek cover shows Amazon's Jeff Bezos. The launch of Amazon in the mid-1990s was a profound development in the annals of bookselling. The efficiency of the shopping process (one-click ordering, for example), the breadth of the inventory, and a consistent policy of "under-promise and over-deliver" when it comes to service set a new standard in a venerable marketplace. A decade...