India gets its chance to peer into the paperless future, as Amazon’s game-changing e-reader hits the country next week. Inventive and useful as it is, the Kindle has also been cast as harbinger of destruction for publishing business-as-usual. Everyone invested in the current chain — publishers, big booksellers, readers and writers — will have to re-adjust, some more radically than others.

The Kindle, of course, is one of the most closed, control-freakish appliances — you can’t lend your book around any more, you can’t resell or share. You can buy books for Kindle only through Amazon. What happens if Amazon builds one gigantic vertical business from acquiring to wirelessly delivering — cutting out every link in the current chain? Right now, it only keeps a dollar on every Kindle book. But given greater girth and power, what’s to say it, or some competitor, won’t push a harder bargain? Not to mention the other nightmares of complete control over our libraries — we got a sneak preview when Amazon reached down and deleted George Orwell’s 1984 from customers’ Kindles, citing a business bungle.

That’s not a public interest issue yet, given that there are emerging alternatives. While Amazon has a huge headstart, Sony Reader struck a deal with Google Books, and is actively evangelised by publishers like Hachette. Paper Logic has showed off a sleek new Kindle-killer to debut next year, Apple’s working on its own answer to Amazon. Whether tethered, restricted platforms like Kindle and Sony or e-readers based on open standards, reading will go mostly digital, sooner rather than later. Which raises a whole set of questions — will digital availability mean that books will end up like music? The drudgery of page-by-page scanning and uploading protected books from piracy on a comparable scale, but once everyone’s hooked on to e-reading, holding off the scofflaws might prove harder for publishers.