This is a day late, but Steven Johnson, in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, had a think about the Kindle, the effect it will have on books, and how it might save newspapers:

(Short version: you'll sell more books, people will finish fewer of them, the world will become one constant online book club, and deep, sustained reading will wither, with people treating novels more like reading online—a little bit here and a little bit there.)

The last two paragraphs:

Skeptics may ask why anyone would pay for something that was elsewhere available at no charge, but that's precisely what they said when Steve Jobs launched the iTunes Music Store, competing with the free offerings on Napster. We've seen how that turned out. If the Kindle payment architecture takes off, it may ultimately lead the way toward the standardized micropayment system whose nonexistence has caused so much turmoil in the news business — a system many people wish had been built into the Web's original architecture, along with those standardized page locations.

We all know the story of how the information-wants-to-be-free ethos of the Web threatened the newspapers with extinction. Wouldn't it be ironic if books turned out to be their savior?

He also doesn't say that a certain kind of late modernist novel, like Finnegan's Wake, will finally find its technology. Those dense, allusive books aren't novels so much as webs of words and puns and references to other things. Their allusiveness is a kind of intellectual hypertexting, and its ideal readers are thoroughbred nerds who know a lot about the Bible, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Shakespeare, Vico, the Vedas, your momma, and everything else.

As Nabokov described Finnegan's Wake:

nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room [...] and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity.

Novels like that were written as pre-hypertexts, with puns and allusions that referenced other works and only the Biggest of Brains, with the information already inside, had access. Now, reading Finnegan's Wake on a Kindle, you could look things up as you go, buy the books referenced them, digitally search A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake for this or that phrase.

The Kindle may democratize and popularize difficult books like Finnegan's Wake, embedding an escalator on the side of Everest. (Yes, I know the internet itself was the first step, but nobody was going to read Finnegan's Wake on a desktop. And the Kindle makes it easier in a bunch of other ways that'll be clear if you read the WSJ article.)

And now please enjoy/shudder at this photostream of LegoGitmo (and Abu Ghraib).