I bought an Amazon.com Kindle e-reader a few weeks ago and just wanted to take a moment to sing its praises.

If you’ve never seen one before, it’s really quite a remarkable device. The screen doesn’t look like a screen. It looks like plastic with text printed directly on it. It’s an amazing revolution in technology that completely bowled me over the first time I saw it, and now I love showing it off to other people to elicit similar reactions. The special screen’s purpose, of course, is to make reading more comfortable on the eyes than reading off of screens has historically been. And as one of those people who really hates reading off of computers, so I can attest that yes, the Kindle is indeed the Obama-esque change we have been waiting for.

It’s a legitimate question, however, as to whether or not the Kindle is a solution in search of a problem. Real books are not nearly bothersome enough to be anywhere near obsolescence, and I seriously doubt they will ever be.

The Kindle’s main advantages are:

a) cheapness- Though the difference is more minimal than many seemed to anticipate, Kindle books aremarginally cheaper than real ones. The discounts are more significant when you consider that you’re buying books through the internet, which would nominally entail all sorts of shipping fees and so forth (especially if you live in weird foreign countries like Canada).

b) ease of research- This mostly appeals to those who read non-fiction, and those who like to imagine they will be consulting the same books over and over again to dredge up important facts and anecdotes for their grad school essays or online arguments or what have you. Because it’s a computer, you can easily search, save, copy, paste, bookmark, or highlight anything of importance in a Kindle book, turning them into more accessible, and thus valuable, long-term reference materials than any old-school book could ever hope to be.

c) mild convenience allowing for greater consumerism- If one already owns a great deal of books, at some point buying more of ‘em becomes a bit of a space concern. Thus, one begins to only buys books that one feels one has an absolute pressing need for; a need that is worth further cluttering up one’s house over. Because the Kindle allows you to store hundreds of books on a single contraption, it renders the aforementioned concerns moot, and allows the consumer to purchase cheap, trashy books at previously unimaginable volumes.

But what about the iPad?

I watched Steven Jobs unveil his new machine yesterday, and like so many others I was not impressed. It’s a big shiny TV screen thing, and those are awful to read off of. Because it wants to do so much other nonsense, the iPad has no serious interest in being a useful or practical e-reader, just a gimmicky one (did you see the faux bookshelf and little faux parchment pages? Come on).

The Kindle is safe.