"On Christmas Day, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books", amazon.com reports in its press release on 26 December 2009.

Commentary:

This could mean that online delivery foor books, after a long wait and a few false starts, might be accelerating much faster than for other media, as electronista suggests.

As long as the news is buried on some geek blogs this means nothing. But what if industry analysts start to pick it up, probably combining it with the other item we heard recently that the Kindle DRM had been cracked?

We might soon see "the end of the book industry as we know it" announced — as we have seen for the music industry — with a call to arms against "illegal downloaders", demands for the extension of copyright protection (as if this would help authors at all), etc., etc., etc.

Will the paper-based book survive? Will authors have to give performances to earn their living like ageing rock stars?

Time will tell … and we might keep an eye on it.