I happened to notice The Atlantic had an interesting article by James Fallows called “It could have been the Kindle”. The title works on two levels. It actually came from something the author's wife said when he lost his cash and credit cards— as in, that would have been worse to have lost his Kindle. However, since the article is really about the limitations of the Kindle when it comes to layout, it also works to suggest that in spite of the Kindle's popularity, it is not the be-all and end-all of eReaders.

I concur. But I'm not sure there will be a single device that works best for all forms of reading for quite a while. If it's big enough to show magazine and newspaper content effectively, it won't be as easy to carry around as my Kindle is.

Color is another story. Magazines really need color, much more than books and even newspapers, and both newspapers and magazines need a larger screen. A Kindle with color would be nice but not worth the extra expense and loss of battery power that would be the immediate result with today's technology. Once those challenges are met, color wouldn't hurt it at all. But I hope they keep making a Kindle-sized eReader for folks like me us who want to carry a library in a purse.

And I hope that ebooks become important enough that publishers never release an ebook with formatting errors, which has happened to me even on books I paid for (Delacorte Pres, I'm talking to you! The messed up quote marks in In this Rain were very distracting!)

So. we're not there yet, but soon. Keep reading!