The lead sentence of a story that appeared in The New York Times on Tuesday, July 19, was unusually sardonic. It read: “Monday was a day for the history books – if those will even exist in the future.”
The more matter-of-fact, stiff-upper-lip story went on in traditional fashion to say that Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced on Monday that for the last three months sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books. In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books.
Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change, predicted that within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions.
The big surprise, Mr. Shatzkin said, was that the day came during the first period that the Kindle faced a serious competitive threat. The Apple iPad, which started sales in April, is marketed as a leisure device for reading, and it has its own e-book store. Yet sales of the Kindle also grew each month during the quarter, Amazon said.
So where is the silver lining for conventional books?
1. Amazon does not specify how paperback sales compare with e-book sales, but paperback sales are thought still to outnumber e-books.
2. Hardcover books are far from extinct. Industry-wide sales are up 22 percent this year, according to the American Publishers Association.
Eric Koch’s new book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
And books used to be written on stone slabs or, in better times, on parchment. Sic transit gloria mundi !
Are you nostalgic for the Sumerians?
Obliquely relevant:
“As the press release has it, “The first classical performance using an iPad in place of traditional paper music” – that’s sheet music, to you and me – happened on Wednesday night. Pianist James Rhodes did play Chopin’s E minor Prelude off of his iPad at the Parabola arts centre, a concert that was part of the Cheltenham festival.
A couple of things ring alarm bells (you can watch the performance on YouTube and make your own mind up). First is that Rhodes didn’t know the E minor Prelude off by heart anyway (a staple of the grade 5 repertory and it would only take a professional pianist about half an hour to get under his or her fingers). Second, there’s a curious moment just after the climax when Rhodes makes a slip with his right hand, and then touches the iPad’s screen. To mark a difficult place to remember to practise next time? To turn the page? Having told the audience that he has about 12,000 scores loaded up on his Jobs-mobile, he says all you have to do to turn a page is tap it – but every edition of the E minor Prelude I’ve ever seen has the piece on one page. Curious. In any case, Rhodes played the Prelude decorously, to rapturous applause”.
Maybe Mr Rhodes is not a touch typist.