Blogging from MacWorld, NYT techmeister John Markoff discovers Steve Jobs‘s disdain for the Amazon.com Kindle:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” Markoff quotes the Apple CEO. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Actually, that’s not true: The statistic cited in the National Endowment for the Arts white paper “To Read or Not to Read” was that, in 2002, 43 percent of Americans over the age of 18 did not read at least one book not required for work or school. But that’s not the point. The point, as I’ve said before, is that negative attitudes like that won’t save literacy. If we want people to start believing that reading is a fun way to spend one’s leisure time, defeatist statements about how nobody reads and nothing’s going to change that are exactly the wrong way to go about doing it.

You could also argue that the Kindle is good for reading other things besides books, or that it’d be a swell tool for the school or workplace, if you really wanted to nitpick.