People Loved Their Horses, Too
Jeff Bezos talks about the Kindle to Walt Mossberg at the D Conference. He notes that 6% of all books (120,000 in all) available in both paper and e-book formats were Kindle books.
Walt: How worried are you about loss of the intangible things offered by physical books?
Bezos: We’re not that worried. “People loved their horses too,” he says, noting that you don’t keep riding your horse to work just because you love it. He adds that Amazon spent some time investigating those intangibles–smell, for example (a combination of a book’s binding, its glue and mildew). “We’re not trying to displace people’s love of the physical book. But what’s important here is not the container, but the long-form narrative.”
