Amazon, Sony E-Readers to Open Floodgates

Fred Bass is responsible for buying thousands of used books and has sold about 8 miles of them each day since 1956. He has turned his Strand bookstore on Broadway and 12th Street in Manhattan into a cult of personality, with its ubiquitous bags showing up in every major U.S. city and its shirts making cameos on "Gossip Girl."

That said, he bears no ill will toward electronic readers like Amazon's(AMZN Quote) Kindle.

"It's a magnificent piece of equipment," Bass says. "It's going to do wonders for the publishing world, so I'm looking at the positives." ...