Back in the Bubble?

Amazon posted a huge increase in revenue this last quarter over the same period last year - 33%! - and Google did similarly - 63%! I have to confess when I saw Google's numbers last week, I did a double-take.

For those of us in the books and technology space, this is certainly good news in the aggregate. It occurred to me last night that we seem to have reached the infamous "tipping point" - text is not getting any less digital. And while certainly the ever-growing pile of books-I-have-to-read on my coffee table is a testament to the usefulness and value of print, the technologies behind creating those print books, distributing them, finding out about them, selling them - this is all digital.

Ebooks themselves will find their place in the natural stream of 0s and 1s, just as downloadable music and video are - first with textbooks and then with other sorts of titles; the usual combination of expense and accessibility has already started to work in the textbook sector. That stream of bytes is not getting any smaller. It will only get inexorably bigger.