In lengthy, punchy critique of Amazon.com, Inc.'s Kindle 2, novelist and passionate print defender Nicholson Baker takes a literary look at the future of reading.

His essay analyzes everything from the Kindle shipping box ("I'd entered some nesting Italo Calvino folktale world of packaging") to a history of the Vizplex "microspheres" underneath the screen. Nevertheless, the most interesting passage is an obsessive bibliophile's huge list of holes in the Kindle Library--an empty bookshelf that will make any dedicated reader cringe.

Check it out: "There is no Amazon Kindle version of 'The Jewel in the Crown.' There's no Kindle of Jean Stafford, no Vladimir Nabokov, no 'Flaubert's Parrot,' no 'Remains of the Day,' no 'Perfume,' by Patrick Suskind, no Bharati Mukherjee, no Margaret Drabble, no Graham Greene except a radio script, no David Leavitt, no Bobbie Ann Mason's 'In Country,' no [Thomas Pynchon], no Tim O'Brien, no 'Swimming-Pool Library,' no Barbara Pym, no Saul Bellow, no Frederick Exley, no 'World According to Garp,' no 'Catch-22,' no 'Breakfast at Tiffany's,' no 'Portnoy's Complaint,' no 'Henry and Clara,' no Lorrie Moore, no 'Edwin Mullhouse,' no 'Clockwork Orange.'" (Author photo via Simon & Schuster)