I’m pretty sure books are going to be gone.

All this has led to a new phrase in the book and newspaper industries: Is this the “iPod moment”? It is a layered and loaded analogy. On the one hand the iPod, Apple’s now legendary music-player, and its associated iTunes store opened up a new market for legal digital-music downloads. On the other hand, the iPod accelerated the decline in CD sales and shifted power from record labels to Apple. Will the Kindle similarly put Amazon in a dominant position, while weakening publishers?

This is unlikely. Books, says Penguin’s Mr Makinson, are different from music. Sales of CDs were harmed because iPod users could “unbundle” the albums that record labels had forced on them, and download only the songs they wanted. By contrast, there is no obvious reason to unbundle narrative books into individual chapters or paragraphs. A book sold via a Kindle thus has no marginal cost, but adds revenues. Another difference is that music was being widely pirated before Apple made legal downloading attractive. There is no such crisis in the book business.