I highly recommend you read Nicholson Baker's review of the Kindle in the New Yorker. It's a little grumpy-old-man, but that's very Bakerish—"Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important—that it was an alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization."

The robo-reader had a polite, halting, Middle European intonation, like Tom Hanks in “The Terminal,” and it was sometimes confused by periods. Once it thought “miss.” was the abbreviation of a state name: “He loved the chase, the hunt, the split-second intersection of luck and skill that allowed him to exercise his perfection, his inability to Mississippi.” I turned the machine off.

He explores the history of e-ink and compares the Kindle to the iPhone. It's a funny, smart article, and the list of titles unavailable on Kindle is an eye-opener, too.

The other big new in the e-reader field is that publishers are approaching Apple about having an e-reader prominently included as part of Apple's alleged upcoming tablet computer.

"It would be a colour, flat-panel TV to the old-fashioned, black and white TV of the Kindle," one publishing executive said.