I have too many books. I came from a schoolteacher family which piled up books and never gave any away. If we wanted a book, it was bought.

So, a lot of books. Mostly read at least once. Very few read more than once. Some barely skimmed. They take up space and dust.

Is the Kindle 2 set to change all this, just as the iPod has done away with huge collections of LPs and CDs for millions of people? It lets you download books via wireless. Plus you can link to feeds from your favourite news outlets, blogs and so on. And it can talk to your iPhone so that when you switch from one gizmo to another you carry on reading where you left off!

Plus it has a dictionary and a super search function – no more furrowed brows and wasted time as you try to remember which bopok and which page that quote was on.

And so on. The unwireless Sony Reader is a waste of space in comparison. But Kindle 2 ships only in the USA. Darn.

Thus Josh Marshall:

… we have two big inset shelves where I keep all the books I feel like I need or want ready at hand. And last night, sitting in front of them, I had this dark epiphany. How much longer are these things going to be around? Not my books, though maybe them too. But just books. Physical, paper books. The few hundred or so I was looking at suddenly seemed like they were taking up an awful lot of space, like the whole business could dealt with a lot more cleanly and efficiently, if at some moral loss.

Don’t get me wrong. Book books still have some clear advantages. Kindle is a disaster with pictures and maps. But I didn’t realize the book might move so rapidly into the realm of endangered modes of distributing the written word. I was thinking maybe decades more.

It will be a lot faster than that.

Books, newspapers, magazines all exist only because they were invented a few hundred years ago as a clever way of passing words to people not standing next to you.

That can be done differently now. And will be.

And, one hopes, far from this signalling the death of reading the whole idea could far faster than we think be rebooted and reborn?