I had an all too brief meeting with Steve Kessel this afternoon, the man responsible for the Amazon Kindle. Like all of the senior hyperintelligent Amazon staff, he was an occasionally infuriating interview, from time to time straight batting away what I thought were rather innocuous questions (although I would say that, wouldn't I?).

However, there were a few interesting nuggets amid his excitement about the new Kindle. First up is the agency model is not being pursued in the UK by Amazon. My colleagues and I have still to speak to publishers about this, but their reaction should be interesting. Kessel played down the likelihood of a universal pricepoint for UK Kindle books. Fag packet estimates in the office suggested £7.99 would probably be about right, but Kessel just promised they would be the lowest in the market and lower than Amazon's pricing for its physical counterpart.

Second was his take on the Andrew Wylie row. It was Wylie who approached Amazon, according to Kessel, and he was keen to stress agents should work with publishers to digitise backlist. He denied Amazon was proactively approaching agency houses for an Odyssey 2.0 type deal although we have heard differently.

Third was his prediction that Amazon's Kindle sales of a book will outstrip those of it in paperback within a year. A rather bold prediction, despite e-book sales growing and growing.

So what of the device itself? I only had a brief play on it and it is practically identical to the older Kindle models. The screen is a lot sharper and it benefits from a gigantic battery life (it can be on for a month without charging with the wi-fi switched off). And the device is extremely thin and very, very light. The £109 price point is definitely a shot across the bows of Apple—the basic 3G iPad clocks in at over £500. It feels to me that it could prove more of an impulse purchase with Kessel expecting sales to kick in in earnest around Christmas.

Amazon missed a trick in waiting almost a year to launch a localised e-book store. Its position on pricing should prompt an interesting response from Apple.