Would you spend $359 to read 130,000 books?

Simon & Schuster to Add 5,000 eBook Titles for Amazon Kindle

We writers depend on readers. Without them, why write? Our words would fall into the same forest where the tree falls unnoticed.

Simon and Shuster announced the addition of 5,000 books they will make available for the Kindle, an e-reader that already has 125, 000 titles on it's list of offerings that includes newspapers, blogs and magazines.

“Kindle is re-igniting a love of reading — after purchasing a Kindle, customers purchase, on average, just as many physical books, and their total book purchases on Amazon increase by 2.6x. ... This commitment from Simon & Schuster moves us closer to our vision for Kindle, which is to make any book, ever printed, in any language available in less than 60 seconds.”

Is this good news for writers who might anticipate that increased interest in reading would result in increased publications, and therefor greater chance for their own book to be published? It's certainly good news for the Kindle folk who still await an explosion of readers who as of yet seem reluctant to read anything that doesn't require turning actual pages.

"Launched on November 19, 2007, Amazon Kindle is Amazon’s revolutionary portable reader that wirelessly downloads books, blogs, magazines, newspapers and personal documents to a crisp, high-resolution electronic paper display that looks and reads like real paper, even in bright sunlight. More than 125,000 books are now available in the Kindle Store, including New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases, which are $9.99, unless marked otherwise. Kindle is available today for $359 at http://amazon.com/kindle."