Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Burying The Lead On The Kindle's Value

At the end of a long reflection on how the Kindle may change the way we buy books, read, write, think, grow vegetables, and say the mass (I can sympathize: He's still in the throes of his Kindle krush), Steven Johnson gets to the all-important save-journalism part at the very end of his Wall Street Journal article:
If the Kindle payment architecture takes off, it may ultimately lead the way toward the standardized micropayment system whose nonexistence has caused so much turmoil in the news business -- a system many people wish had been built into the Web's original architecture, along with those standardized page locations.

We all know the story of how the information-wants-to-be-free ethos of the Web threatened the newspapers with extinction. Wouldn't it be ironic if books turned out to be their savior?

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