Melville House Books

“People keep asking me, as an owner of an old-fashioned brick-and-mortar independent bookstore, what I think of the Amazon Kindle,” says Pete Mulvihill, co-owner of the Green Apple bookstore in San Francisco. “So I bought one.”

Once he had it at the store, his staff, he says, came up with a way to evaluate it: “pitting ‘The Book’ against the Kindle in a smack-down of the most literary sort.” Lucky for us, they videotaped the effort. Here’s episode one — of ten. Check out the others at their blog (where there’s some other funny stuff to boot) ….

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.