On Finally Being Led by the Nose

A lovely graphite slab - something so much like a real version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that some people have "Don't Panic" Laser-Etched in large, friendly letters on the sensual grey soft-touch back cover - The Kindle 3 - an icon like a limited-edition 4AD CD - a self-contained holder for any amount of information you could want. You can keep your iPad - that glassy show-off is Liberace to The Kindle's Chopin.

Mine is already packed with literary loveliness for which I have not paid a penny - all selected with a single touch on the machine itself without all that tedious mucking about with USBs.

And still it can be improved. The display lends itself to Henri Cartier Bresson coolness by just being only able to display in black and white. Amazon have exploited this possible failure in the face of all the colour than abounds in the world of portable devices by setting the sleep savers to be famous authors and other icons of high-culture such that when switched off, the machine looks like something not electronic at all. Here is Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Jules Verne and many others of that ilk. Of course after a while of the children switching it off and on and off just to see who will come up next, I am bored with these and want my own. So with a few downloads and no more than the copying of a single file to the machine, I have hacked it to use my own grey scale, 8-bit, 600x800 portraits - heroes all of them. And not so high-brow any more - more popular culture. And this annoys my wife who thinks the aloof apartness of the machine has been compromised by the masses - I imagine she thinks it is something like displaying a Warhol in Tate Britain. However, I am not to be diverted from this - my eReader - my rules so they will remain until I get bored of them as well and they are replaced with another set of favorites.