All I seem to talk about here, these days, is Kindle. But this article: “Despite hurdles e-books face, E Ink Corp. of Cambridge has come into its own supplying electronic paper“, in today’s Business section of the Globe, is worth reading.

And this little zing from Carolyn Y. Johnson in the article had me snorting DD’s coffee out my nose:

The demo model provided to the Globe stopped working yesterday, not responding no matter how many times the reporter depressed the reset button with a paper clip -a problem never encountered with an actual book.

Whoops. Maybe it was a suspense novel she was reading, imagine the authorial possibilities!

She raises a few good points… and my greatest argument against the Kindle (I’m not wholly averse to e-books, just not crazy about paying to read blogs, the ugly design of the Kindle, and the loss of the tactile nature of reading, which leads me to…) is this line, from Jane Austen’s pretty funny Northhanger Abbey: when you’re getting near the end, and there are loose ends to tie up:

The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment
must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all
who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend,
I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see
in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them,
that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity.

There’s no tell-tale compression of the pages (unless she was talking about gzip) in these ebooks. At the very least I’ll give the Kindle this: it’s gotten everyone talking and thinking about the electronic book.