I was going to write this post yesterday but my colleague, Mathew Ingram beat me to it and did a spectacular job. I just wanted to focus on one small thing that came to my mind when I read this news news item in The New York Times about Amazon (s AMZN) now becoming a publisher and competing with traditional publishers.

“The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” Russell Grandinetti of Amazon told the Times. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.” Couldn’t have said it better myself. For 600 years since Gutenberg created the modern press/book industry, we finally are seeing a change. The fossilized ways of publishing business are being questioned. Amazon can get comfortable and enjoy the status quo that is today’s publishing business. Instead, Jeff Bezos sees an opportunity to reinvent the industry and the idea of the book itself.

What’s happening to the book business – not the idea or the concept of a book – is no different that any other industry that is being touched by what I like to call connectedness. This connectedness changed travel, stock trading and even the idea of car-rentals. And all that is just tip of the iceberg. The redefinition of our world won’t be limited just to books. (It is one of the main reasons I am hosting our next conference, GigaOM RoadMap on November 10, 2011 in San Francisco with those who are helping invent the future.)