Digital Trends

Reading a book online is like cooking a hotdog with your bare hands at a campfire: it doesn’t really work, and the longer you try, the more it hurts. Even if you find a really compelling e-book, current generation LCD screens flicker too much – your brain and your eyes know this, even if you can’t tell – and the resolution is too low. Besides, no one wants to curl up for the night in front of their Dell desktop. Yet, as major newspapers such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer move to an online-only format, the issue of reading online will only become more important. Amazon recently upgraded its first eBook reader, the Kindle, to make online reading more bearable – without a computer and without the Web. It’s an intelligent device, marred only slightly by a less-than-stylish approach and scant “open e-book” support.