Kindle 2: Love and Loathing

Slate.com has a good review of the Kindle 2 by Farhad Manjoo (via Sullivan btw). He loves it.

For starters, it's gorgeous. Unlike its bulky predecessor, the redesigned $359 Kindle, which came out this week, is light, thin, and disappears in your hands. If you think there's no way you could ever get used to curling up with an electronic reader, you haven't given the Kindle a chance. Load up a good book and you'll soon forget you're reading plastic rather than paper. You'll also wonder how you ever did without it.

And he fears it.

Amazon's reader is a brilliant device that shanghais book buyers and the book industry into accepting a radically diminished marketplace for published works. If the Kindle succeeds on its current terms, and all signs suggest it'll be a blockbuster (thanks Oprah!), Amazon will make a bundle. But everyone else with a stake in a vibrant book industry—authors, publishers, libraries, chain bookstores, indie bookstores, and, not least, readers—stands to lose out.

I don't think I've yet seen such a comprehensive take on the Kindle and how it might effect the book industry. Since, dear reader, you are reading Sententiae, it is a foregone conclusion that you are a reader of books, you might want to take a look at this article.

For me, the biggest drawback to the Kindle is that its cheap books are NYTs' best sellers. Anything I really want to read costs 15% less than the cover price, which for academic books can reach well over $100. For an e-book?

but then, I'm still using fountain pens, so you can't accuse me of being technologically "adventuresome."