There is a cherished myth about the book business in which publishers engage in a noble pursuit above the pedestrian world of commerce. That myth has tended to exclude book publishing from the mass-media category and colored perceptions of reading as an antiquated pastime ripe for extinction.

But what if that myth is wrong? What if books are not a media laggard but a leader? What if publishing has proved innovative not in form—books are still printed much as they have been for hundreds of years—but in distribution? What if the rest of the mass media has become more niche-oriented and word-of-mouth dependent, as book marketing has always been?

One of the largest and most admired companies of the Internet era—a $32 billion behemoth—was not only launched upon consumers' love of books; well into its second decade, media remain the foundation—56 percent—of its sales. Amazon (AMZN) is that company. And the stunning success of its Kindle electronic reader suggests that books, not newspapers or magazines, may be the basis for the future of writing as a business.

At the early May press conference announcing the third version of the Kindle reader, Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and CEO, told the audience that e-book sales had become 35 percent of Amazon's sales when an electronic edition was available. More than that, this stunning figure was "coincident" with the launch of the Kindle 2 in February. Way back then, e-book sales were 13 percent of book sales when an electronic version was available. In less than three months, with the introduction of the Kindle 2, electronic books sales had nearly tripled.

I'd like to suggest a reason for that. But before I go further and make a case for books as the vanguard of the media's future—stifle that laugh until you've heard me out—let's examine the myth of the tweedy book business. A few months after Peter Olson was ousted from his position as CEO of Random House last year, he gave an interview with Portfolio magazine in which he claimed his legacy was to be being a "part of a process of making something that was a gentleman's hobby into a real business."

What's comical about this statement is that most of Olson's forerunners in the business were anything but gentlemen. Great businessmen, yes; gentlemen, no. Financially savvy Leon Shimkin, wily pornographer Barney Rosset, profane playboy Roger Straus, and dozens more stretching back into the 19^th century were all flinty operators who constantly broke with received wisdom and created profitable new lines of business while they skimped, chiseled, and sometimes swindled to make a buck from the old ones.