Has Amazon finally got the printed-book killer?

So now Amazon.com honcho Jeff Bezos apparently thinks he and his incredibly successful firm can succeed where Sony, Microsoft, Adobe and others have all failed: in bringing to market a successful e-book reader and format, called Kindle. (See CNet's report on the product's splashy launch here.)

I can see three strikes against it right off the bat:

1. !t's still way more expensive than your average old-fashioned mass-market paperback ($399 vs. about $8.00—and don't think I've forgotten the good old days when new paperbacks were less than $3!). I don't think a lot of people will be willing to fork over hundreds of dollars in one big honkin' outlay when they can spend teensy amounts to buy one book at a time (or more, for hardcovers not yet reissued in paperback).
     
2. No backlight! (How the frak are you supposed to read it at night on a plane or bus? Or in a poorly-lit indoor room when you can't turn on a lamp or something?)
    
   
3. It's small enough that it can be all too easily lost, stolen or dropped and busted, not only putting you out your fancy-schmancy reader (and four Benjamins), but half your library as well. (The unit stores its books internally and requires no intermediary PC to purchase or transfer books bought; Amazon has hooked it directly into their online store using Sprint's EV-DO network.)

What do y'all think? Has the Jeffster really got something here? Or is there simply no substitute for the tactile sensation of a real dead-tree book in your hands?

"Four score and seven years ago..."

One of the best-known speeches in history was given on this date in 1863 at Gettysburg, PA by the late former US President, Abraham Lincoln (R). It exemplifies the advice on public speaking given decades later by his successor, Franklin Roosevelt: "Be sincere, be brief, be seated." It is also the finest memorial to the sacrifices made by our or any country's men and women in uniform I have ever encountered.

The Great Emancipator's speech, reportedly composed on the back of an envelope on a train en route to the site, contains the phrase, "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here." About the soldiers he had come to help honor, he was quite right in the latter; but in the former, his becoming modesty made him more wrong than he could possibly have imagined...as anyone who's been to his memorial in Washington, DC and seen those supposedly insignificant words carved into its marble walls, there to stand for the ages, can attest.

Let us all pray that once more, "this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."