On December 3, 2008, the big boys of the publishing industry were rattled with a wave of layoffs that included some of the top figures in the industry.  It was shocking!

Doom!  Doom!  Doom!

Cue a thousand proclamations of the all-but-certain demise of the publishing industry.

Then, at 12:43 p.m. on December 4, Mike Cane produced this gem of the 140 character form.

Behold:

How many hundreds of thousands of characters of written media gloom and hand-wringing were gutted and left for dead by this single Tweet?

Now the question remains:  are these downsized editors and publicists really so brilliant, or are/were they just part of the problem?

Thou art a truth-speaker, Mike Cane.  May a million e-Books fall from the heavens and surround thee.

Via Mike Cane, New York’s heroic Soft Skull Press may soon be offering many (most?  all?) of its books for the Kindle and Sony Reader, with an iPhone option lurking in the future.  Damn right.

But do I want to live without those lickabley delicious cover designs?  Maybe Soft Skull can put high-res pdfs of their covers online, and we can print them out and wrap them around the reader (or just throw them on the floor and roll around on top of them).

Update: Check out Soft Skull Publisher Richard Nash’s thought-provoking words re: the cover design issue in the Comments.