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Kindle's Cool, but Remember the Web?

By Abe Dane
If anyone can obsolete the printed book, Amazon can, and they're clearly taking a formidable whack at it with their handheld Kindle reader.

We can't help wondering, though, how many consumers will really pay $400 for a single-purpose reading device, when alternatives from a riotously competitive hardware market combine reading with phone, messaging, music and other capabilities.

For example, the iPhone pictured here, with a tasty looking page delivered via Tizra's Agile PDF. We wish we could say it's the result of some special technology we came up with for delivering books to mobile devices, but really it's just a byproduct of the fact that Agile PDF makes books work like the web. So as the web finds its way into more mobile devices, so will books published with Agile PDF. Meanwhile, of course, there are already a billion or so eager readers accessing the web through more traditional means.

By the way, the sesame crusted tuna's from Montreal's Aix Cuisine du Terroir, one of hundreds of restaurants reviewed by the eat.shop guides, which you'll be hearing more about soon.

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