I recently bought my first book on kindle, and I must say that it was a profound experience with implications way beyond just the simplicity of buying books.
Kindle has the potential to kill the following industries:
Kindle has the potential to kill the following industries:
- Seeds, fertilizers and pesticide industry
- Plantations and agriculture
- Lumbering
- Transportation
- Paper industry
- Ink industry
- Printing machine manufacturing
- Printing industry
- Book publishing industry
- Book retailers &logistics
- Paper recycling industry
In all the above industries, jobs would be lost as more and more people buy ebooks than those who buy paper books.
There is another impact - flight of capital. I buy the book from amazon, a US based company, in USD and the book gets downloaded to my device bypassing customs. Indian Govt looses on customs duty + local taxes. Further, while earlier for an Indian edition of a foreign book only royalty and profits would have got repatriated, with kindle the entire revenue gets repatriated.
While one could argue that the negative economic losses is a small price to pay for the ensuing environmental gains, the fact is that kindle would have a more profound impact on economy of a country than I would have imagined.
