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By David Rothman

image Ugh, aren’t Wall Street Journal readers aware by now of the existence of the Kindle? I’m amazed that the WSJ would waste space on The Digital Future of Books, an opinion piece from L. Gordon Crovitz. Look, I appreciate pro-E articles, and I’m pleased to see Jeff Gomez’s book get some well-deserved attention. But there are business and tech issues whose outcomes could influence the reading habits of Americans and others for decades to come. Do we really want to replace old monopolies with new ones—or maybe even a new one? Crovitz, at least in the article, is blind to the risks here.

image The WSJ needs to Connect The Dots, ponder the lawsuit just filed against Amazon’s POD side, and examine the company’s treatment of publishers, the lock-in issues and Amazon’s failure so far to incorporate the IDPF’s ePub standard in the Kindle.

The positives: Crovitz is a former Journal publisher and an ex-Dow Jones executive vice president who helped plan the WSJ’s stellar Web site, focusing it on the news of the moment, while letting the print edition play up more analytic pieces. I’m happy to see someone of this stature excited about the Kindle, which, by the way, includes the Journal in its offerings. I just wish he’d been more up to speed on Kindle-related issues. Oh, well, among mainstream journalists, he’s hardly alone.

In fairness to the WSJ: It did publish an informative item on the POD issue. Now how about some followup?

 
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