Amazon's E-Book Gamble Gets Big Play

News that Amazon would debut its new Kindle e-book leaked earlier this week, and a Newsweek cover story has the full hype on what Jeff Bezos and company hope to achieve with it. "This isn't a device, it's a service," Bezos says of of the Kindle, pointing to its "Whispernet" wireless connection, which uses Sprint's EVDO network, as one of its key attributes.

Biblio-soothsayers predict an "always-on" device that can download books, magazines  and newspapers that could lead to not only cheaper prices ($9.99 for bestsellers) but perhaps the demise of the lone author, especially for non-fiction titles, in favor of wiki-style community writing based on constant annotation. Net-connected literature, says Google's book search manager, is about  “getting rid of the idea that a book is a [closed] container." (More Amazon.com stories.)