If you go to Amazon's UK website today you will find that most of the home page is taken up by a personal message from founder Jeff Bezos, extolling the virtues of the firm's Kindle e-reader.

This week's big news in the world of e-books and their ilk is of course that the Kindle is going to be available for sale outside of America (though not quite everywhere worldwide just yet) for the first time later this month.

In Bezos' letter he describes the Kindle as "the #1 bestselling product across all the millions of items we sell on Amazon.com". I was pretty amazed by that fact - more Kindles sold than, say, Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga, and even the mighty 8Gb SanDisk SDHC card? Apparently so. Amazon won't give specific figures out, natch, but an American analyst estimates that Amazon sold 500,000 Kindles in the US last year.

Irony of ironies, the Kindle will be available here from October 19, the same day on which St Ives will announce its year-end results (also notable for being the day of the PrintWeek Awards). St Ives' book printing wing Clays has been the golden child of the group for many years now, aided in part by the succession of blockbusters delivered by JK Rowling. But the wizard wheeze is over.

Not to say that book sales will crumble overnight. I'm thinking long and hard about whether I'm willing to shell out $279.00 for a Kindle when printed books represent such great value for money, and I can freely share them with friends once I'm done reading myself. But St Ives and its counterparts in the book printing business will surely be keeping a close eye on developments. Many other e-readers are already available, of course, but the Kindle is the big one. The potential game changer. The device that could turn out to be the iPod of the book world.   

But it's not just about books. Newspaper and magazine publishers who as we know aren't making enough return from their online content and online advertising can sell subscriptions to their titles in Kindle format. The Times, Telegraph, Independent and Daily Mail are already among their number. Only a dozen magazines are currently available, but surely this will change.

Such a nifty route to paid content could, in a weird roundabout way, ultimately benefit print if publishers choose to focus on those channels - print included - where they have more control over revenues.