Lots has been written about the new Kindle ebook reader from Amazon. This post will not critique Kindle other than to say I think it is a brilliant device and strategy from Amazon.

This post is rather about Kindle's historcal place in the evolution of ebooks. My career in publishing took root back in 1971. Microfilm had been around for a long time. Microfiche was new back then. Instead of a roll of film printed materials were reproduced on "film cards" that reproduced 96 pages of printed material. In 1971 "ultrafiche" were invented. Ultrafiche were microfiche that contained aout 3500 pages of printed material in a microformat. The invention of ultrafiche was reported on the front page of The New York Times. Predictions abounded about how the New York Public Library would one day fit into a few shoeboxes full of ultrafiche. Portable devices were also created in the 1970s that would allow a user to read an ultrafiche on a portable reader. My work at the time was as founder and publisher of a journal called "Microform Review" which reviewed microfilm and microfiche collections for research libraries. I became an expert on micropublishing. I might also add that my doctoral dissertation was entitled "Scholarly Micropublishing in America: 1900-1980" which was later published by Greenwood Press of Westport, Connecticut.

This background started me on the road to observing and reporting on different forms of the "delivery of information." In the 1980s I was reporting and running tradeshows on the videodisc, optical disk and revolutionary CD-ROM. In the early 1990s I ran a tradeshow called "Electronic Books." The star of this show was then new Apple "Newton" which was a first attempt at electronic book delivery. Over the years we have observed other attempts from Sony and others.

And now the Kindle. The Kindle to me is a prototype of what will spur many more versions until Amazon gets it absolutely right.