Geoff Nunberg Discusses Amazon.com's new Kindle

For latest Kindle, a flow of adjectives and speculation

By David Mehegan

Seldom has a new product that isn't really new created such excitement as Amazon.com's Kindle 2, whose arrival was announced yesterday at New York's Morgan Library & Museum. The event has been anticipated for days and garnered intense coverage. With novelist Stephen King on hand, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos presented the improved electronic reader, which is pencil-thin, weighs about 10 ounces, holds as many as 1,500 books, and will sell for $359....

Few people think this is the end of the book as we know it, however.

"The success of the Kindle is a significant event in the way people consume booklike texts," said Geoffrey Nunberg, linguist at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Information and an NPR commentator on language. "But whether it's a sign of the decline of the book is less likely." New technology, Nunberg said, seldom kills its predecessors. "Almost always, one technology refines another, as photography refined painting. There's nothing broken about the book as a form. It still works."...

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