I'm doing my best not to become a kindle bore. When I catch myself evangel-izing to someone who couldn't care less about the marvels of the 2.0 version of Amazon's reading machine-I can take a whole library on vacation! Adjust the type size! Peruse the morning paper without getting out of bed! -I pause and remember my boyhood friend Scott H., who loved showing off the capabilities of his state of-the-art stereo but had only four records because he wasn't really that into music.So apologies in advance if I'm irksomely enthusiastic about my cool new literature delivery system. Like early PCs, the Kindle 2 is a primitive tool. And like the Rocket e-book of 1999 (524 titles available!), it will surely draw chuckles a decade hence for its limitations-the black-and-white display, its lack of built-in lighting and the robotic intonation of the text-to-voice feature. The marketplace will mutate and mature. Sony and Google have already announced a new challenge to Amazon's leadership. But however the technology evolves, Jeff Bezos has built a machine that marks a cultural revolution. The Kindle 2 signals that after a happy 550-year union, reading and printing are getting separated. It tells us that printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.
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