There is a fantastic and fascinating article in the latest Fast Company about Amazon's attempt to do for publishing what Apple did for music. The idea being that with the Kindle, Amazon has the premiere device that people will use for reading and downloading books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs; similar to what Apple did with the MP3 player. The result for Apple is that they own the market and they have the power to control the music business. Now Amazon can possibly do the same with the publishing world and soon authors might be able to cut a deal directly with Amazon and skip the publishers all together.

Sounds like a plan, huh? Well, what if Apple decides to put out their own version of the Kindle and it's sexier in a way that only Apple can produce?

“Jeff Bezos is trying to do to book publishers what Steve Jobs of Apple did to the music industry. With its iPod and iTunes Store, Apple carved out a largely virgin market so fast that it was able to wrest control of the digital-music distribution system and thus dictate what the record labels could do. With Amazon jamming (its latest earnings are sky-high even as other online retailers are in a state of malaise), Bezos may sense similar opportunity, a moment when he, in true Jobs-like fashion, could colonize this growing niche for the Amazon ecosystem. Should that happen, book publishers would have more to fear than just being squeezed. Amazon could phase them out completely, treating them as the ultimate middlemen orphaned by a new technology.”

Read this article!