Believe it. The e-tailer will sell $US1.2 billion of e-book readers, e-books and e-newspapers this year as Kindle (above) and Amazon.com do to books what iPod and iTunes did to music.

My wife’s scheming to have a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf built along the back wall of our living room. Aside from having to pay for it, I think this is a grand idea.

Books look good. They let you show off your good taste. And everybody likes the tactile sensation of leafing through a bound volume, and laughs at nerd-lingers who promotes downloadable e-books. Or, worse, e-book reading gadgets.

But then again Kurt Anderson once thought people’s love of album art would save vinyl.

Now, bar a handful of DJs, vinyl is extinct. A lot of people under 25 have never bought a CD in their lives, let alone carefully considering download versus disc.

Could there be an eBook generation on the way, mirroring the iTunes generation of today?

Amazon is banking on it.

Just as the iPod and iTunes revolutionised the way people listen to music, popularising a digital music format that had been lurking around the net for years, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos wants to sell his Kindle reader (left) en masse, with readers madly downloading content to the device.

True, Kindle drew predictable guffaws when it was first unveiled in November 2007.

But suddenly, it’s looking like a revolution. Mad Jeff is on to something.

Amazon itself won’t break out any numbers. But after crawling through the company’s boomer Christmas quarter results, announced Friday, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney reckons the company sold 500,000 Kindles during 2008, despite the device being restricted to US-only sales.

To put that in perspective, that’s 32% more units than Apple’s iPod sold in its debut year.

More astoundingly, in Mahaney reckons Amazon will clock $US1.2 billion in Kindle-related sales during 2009 – both from moving the $US399, paperback-size wireless Kindle itself, and sales of Kindle e-Books (Amazon.com now has more than 200,000 on its site, including almost all the current best seller). Amazon also gets a cut on e-versions of newspapers like USA Today, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal ($US9.99 a month), which are downloaded then, like ebooks, transferred to a Kindle via a Sprint cellular connection rather than the wi-fi you might expect (in a nice touch, Amazon collects the download tab).

Just as iPod owners pay less for downloadable songs than they used to for CDs, but buy a lot more tracks, Kindle owners pay less for eBooks (most are sold at for $US9.99) but are buying more books than the average Amazon visitor.

With version 2 of Kindle due to be unveiled Monday, it could be the end of the world as we know it.

Or maybe not.

Chief exec Bezos does reveal that Kindle owners (shall we call them Kindlers?) not only suck down a lot of e-books, the better to enjoy them on the device’s crisp, “papper”-looking black and white screen, but also buy more hardcopy books that the average Amazon customer.

Looks like I’ll have to pay for those shelves after all.