Nicholson Baker on Amazon Kindle

["Joseph Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Nicholson Baker has an entertainingly Luddite piece in The New Yorker on the
Amazon Kindle:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/03/090803fa_fact_baker?currentPage=all

Here is a taste:

"Well, well! I began to have the mildly euphoric feeling that you 
get ten minutes into an infomercial. Sure, the Kindle is 
expensive, but the expense is a way of buying into the total 
commitment. This could forever change the way I read. I've never 
been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I 
put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again. 
Maybe, I thought, if I ordered this wireless Kindle 2 I would be 
pulled into a world of compulsive, demonic book consumption, like 
Pippin staring at the stone of Orthanc. Maybe I would gorge 
myself on Rebecca West, or Jack Vance, or Dawn Powell. Maybe the 
Kindle was the Bowflex of bookishness: something expensive that, 
when you commit to it, forces you to do more of whatever it is 
you think you should be doing more of."

Joe Esposito