Image Credit: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

At a press event this morning, in which Amazon announced its game-changing new products, there were a whole lot of tech writers and a handful of books people in attendance. You could tell who was who pretty easily: The techies’ fingers were atwitter, either Tweeting or frantically live-blogging Jeff Bezos’ every word, whereas a number of the books people carried pads (not of the “i” variety) and pens. To the techies, the most interesting person in the room was obviously Bezos; to a lot of the books people, the man of the hour was Larry Kirshbaum, the popular New York publishing veteran who’s now heading up the Amazon Publishing unit.

Kirshbaum probably personifies the meeting of traditional and digital publishing better than anyone else, having headed up Time Warner Books before wrangling authors to write Amazon originals. Before Bezos took the stage, Kirshbaum chatted up the print folks, including The New Yorker‘s Ken Auletta and a couple of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt editors who were visiting from Boston. Traditional publishers generally have mixed to negative opinions of Amazon — I’d imagine Kirshbaum has some complicated feelings himself — but Bezos started off the proceedings with a somewhat conciliatory message to put the old school publishers at ease: Amazon still sells plenty of physical books. In the slide above, you see that sales of physical books are increasing; Kindle book sales are increasing, too, just exponentially.

Bezos launched into a lengthy speech on the current Kindle’s incredible success before he made the first big announcement of the day: the Kindle Touch. READ FULL STORY »