The LAT’s Ulin on the trouble with Kindle:

For Amazon, books are a business, and the more hegemony it exerts over the market, the better off it is. For the culture, though, books and information serve as a collective soul, a memory bank, something bigger than mere commerce that shouldn’t be merely bought and sold.

Because of that, it’s not the incidents themselves but their ramifications that are disturbing, the idea that Amazon can effectively alter the collective memory at will. The issue, in other words, isn’t that Amazon has erased material from people’s Kindles, or de-ranked gay and lesbian writers, but that it can.

Apple will have a new Kindle competitor (essentially a giant iPod touch) out by early 2010…  (Sounds more like a tablet computer than an e-reader, which, if I’m not mistaken, rides on the major selling point of NOT being a computer with a lit screen… I suppose we’ll see.)

Not book related at all: “Computer? Computer?” They’ve finally invented transparent aluminium