Last week, Kindle content head David Naggar appeared on a panel alongside Macmillan chief executive John Sargent, Google's Roland Lange, and long-time Writers House agent Simon Lipskar, to discuss – what else? – "the future of the book."

The event was organized by William Morris-Endeavor agent Eric Simonoff for the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

"What happens when the physical bookstore experience disappears?" Simonoff enquired.

Sargent, courtesy of all the attention the publication of one author – subsidiary FSG's Jonathan Franzen - is garnering in bookstores and everywhere else at the moment, was in a mood to share some home truths. "No doubt we're on a path where those guys have to change their models enough so they can live off reduced bookselling in their square footage. But it's entirely conceivable that ten or twenty years from now there will be very few bookstores in America….It will take ten years to figure it out."

Lipskar also opted for blunt-is-best: "People should feel guilty if they buy a Kindle edition versus a hardcover, but not versus a paperback, in terms of what the author gets….But the crux issue of the digital age is: How do you see the future of discovery? How are we going to find books where there is no B&N 'stepladder' and when the New York Times doesn't move them as it used to?"

It was interesting to hear Naggar - who has been in Seattle only eighteen months as opposed to the sixteen years he spent at Random House – respond so fully in Amazon-speak: "Amazon does a better job online in terms of discovery than just putting a book next to a similar book in a physical store." He also repeated the Amazon mantra: "Buy once, read everywhere."

"Except if you bought at Apple or Google and then it can't follow you to the Kindle," Sargent countered.

Later Naggar tried again: "there's never been a better time to be an author."

"I know a lot of them who would disagree," Lipskar shot back.  "Making a living at writing across a broad swathe of people becomes damned difficult," Sargent added.

Moving right along, he cautioned that we have to move quickly to extinguish piracy: 100% of Macmillan's frontlist was available in unauthorized versions last Christmas. Selling at an affordable price is the key.

Yet "the value proposition goes ever downward when on screen," Sargent lamented. "The perceived value decreases without a physical object even if there are tons of enhancements….We don't know what consumers will want…but we have to be very careful not to get sucked into building what they don't want, as we did with CD-ROMs.

"There will be fads. We'll all lose money. And then we'll learn."