BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, Amazon introduced yet another Kindle electronic reader. The Kindle DX is larger than its two predecessors to make it easier to read newspapers and magazines. We don't know if this Kindle will help revive those ailing paper products because Amazon won't reveal Kindle’s sales figures. We do know that Kindle has sparked new and unprecedented interest in a reading device that is larger than a cell phone but smaller than a laptop, unlike successive earlier generations of e-readers that are piled up in the gadget graveyard. Paul Saffo, technology forecaster and Visiting Scholar in the Stanford Media X Research Network, says the Kindle has succeeded, in part, by not pretending to be a book.

PAUL SAFFO: It’s the Bakelite phenomena. When the first plastic Bakelite was invented in 1907, everybody spent their time trying to make it look like wood and tortoiseshell. And it took them about ten years to realize that it made pretty lousy wood and tortoiseshell. Someone said, let's let plastic be plastic, and then things got interesting. The same thing is happening with computers. The first electronic tablets were attempting to imitate the book. The important thing about the Kindle is that it’s more than a device. The Kindle - it’s essential that it’s got a wonderful screen and a great form factor, but not sufficient. What completed it is that it’s connected to a store where you could buy things, and it has built-in connectivity.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You initially said that the Kindle would do to books what the iPod did to music. Now you say that the Kindle is going to do to the magazine [LAUGHS] what the iPod did to music.

PAUL SAFFO: Well, more precisely, what the Kindle’s going to do is it’s going to break the spine of magazines apart, so that you can buy single stories, instead of entire issues, in the same way that the iPod allows us to buy more music than ever. We just don't buy the album; we buy the song. But then it opens up opportunities for whole new literary experiences. But it’s inconvenient to both sell short stories in the form of a book collection and inconvenient to buy them that way. Well, with an electronic medium like the Kindle or an e-book, you can just sell one story at a time and you don't have to mess around with putting them into a book.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: To me, the Kindle as a device seems almost quaint. A single use device doesn't seem to be the way that we're headed. I mean, we both know that Apple has been experimenting with a device – it’s just around the corner – that will combination the iPhone, the Kindle, the Netbook, and bring us ever closer to that ideal, a customizable, all-purpose portable screen that will bring us virtually anything that we want when we're on the road. I mean, we're already there. Isn't the Kindle really more like the eight-track tape machine? Isn't it, as one writer for PC World said, isn't the Kindle “kindling” already?

PAUL SAFFO: The way to think about it is you have very large devices on your desktop computers. You have medium-sized devices, laptops that you carry in a briefcase. And then there’s a gap down to something you hold in your hand, a BlackBerry, an iPhone. It’s that gap in the middle that’s about to get filled in with a device that’s all screen, looks like a tablet, but it’s mainly a display device. And yes, indeed, it will do lots more than just be a display device for reading. It'll be a display device for movies. You will also be able to use it for communications. So while you may not necessarily ever reach a point where you carry only one device in your life, that new class of tablet device is going to do a lot more than just read books from Amazon.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: There have been some arguments over the pricing of books on Kindle. Right now there’s pretty much an under-10-dollar limit. Can they play with those prices?

PAUL SAFFO: You can absolutely play with the prices. Once the installed base gets bigger, then you've got a super-bestseller, you might able to sell it for more. But this is also where we have the crossover from repurposing old paper-based media in cyberspace, on the Kindle, electronic books, to moving into a new environment where you have native-born digital experiences that are sold. You can chase stories down rabbit holes and discover things that otherwise you'd probably be too lazy to look up. And ultimately, I think, we'll see a return back to that 1980s vision of stories like spider webs.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Are you talking about Choose Your Own Adventure kind of stories?

PAUL SAFFO: We have never really had an environment where we could create stories with an infinite amount of endings. And now we're getting readers that can do that. We have the software that can do it. I suspect that we're going to see new literary forms that really are infinite.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But this isn't particular to the Kindle, is it? I mean, it’s particular to the Internet and to cyberspace and that kind of multilateral communication that’s possible in real time now. But we don't need a device, a single use device, to make that possible.

PAUL SAFFO: The device does matter, because you have to be able to carry that device as a window into the part of your life where you want to slouch back with a book, on a beach or lying on the couch with your feet higher than your head. And you can't do that with laptops and their stupid keyboards. You really need this device. So the device is an essential part of the experience.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Some people have criticized the Kindle because basically what you've purchased is locked onto your device, but you don't own the content. You can't lend it to a friend, unless you hand over your Kindle.

PAUL SAFFO: Nothing new ever comes into our lives without a hidden curse. And all the convenience of having it in electronic form comes with that price. And - it troubles me greatly. Those of us who remember when we could share books with friends will be bothered by this for the rest of our lives, and a younger generation that grows up with the idea that you buy things and you use it once, and if you want it again you buy it again, aren't going to be bothered. But I'd also ask yourself, how many times lately have you really borrowed a book from a friend or have you really read a book a second time, or have you asked a friend to loan you a book? Well, for those things that you want to read more than once, you know, buy them in paper.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think that publishing houses should abhor the Kindle or celebrate it?

PAUL SAFFO: You know, the only constant is change. An old order is disappearing – and it’s been long expected – and there are all sorts of new opportunities. So my advice to publishers, who I talk to a lot, is you really only have one option, and that is to flee into the future just as fast as you can.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Paul, thank you very much.

PAUL SAFFO: My pleasure.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Paul Saffo is a technology forecaster and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Media X Research Network.