I’m in the midst of getting over a hump on a book I’ve been writing and I had a frank discussion today about Kindle and what it means to the publishing industry. Last quarter Kindle books out-sold Amazon’s printed titles. That’s a big red flag. So my discussion today was about marketing on a Kindle-specific release, if we choose not to invest in printed product (as I see the future not belonging to print anyway). The conversation was going nowhere so I asked the magic question… who buys these things? We can’t market it likes it’s a normal book. We should market it to people who own the damn Kindle. I found in my research that Kindle is 70% owned by readers 40 – 65. That’s a narrow niche, but does that mean that reading in general is going out the window? It doesn’t worry me so much because e-reader buyers are early adopters and those stats line up with people who bought DVDs and PCs at first. What does spook me is that people 40 – 65 are the buying center of the publishing world. I wonder how long it will be before booksellers are shit out of luck as retail businesses.