Facing down more than 200 reporters from a skinny stage at the Morgan Library in New York City, Jeff Bezos and Stephen King unveiled Amazon's Kindle 2--a .36 inch thick digital reader with 25 percent more battery life than the original. It will cost $359 and ships February 24.

The new device will last two weeks on a single charge, hold 1,500 books, and keep a reader's place in-between digital reading devices. Bezos demonstrated the Kindle 2 with Cormac McCarthy's The Road--searching the meaning of the word "chary" on the Kindle's dictionary.

King appeared at the conference, reading a scene from a short story he wrote in January about a "crisis point" between traditional and digital books. It contained a few pages of loving description of the Kindle.

The machine also has a text-to-speech function, turning any e-book into an audiobook. To demonstrate, Bezos had friendly robot voice read the Gettysburg Address. Amazon added USA Today and the New Yorker to the Kindle 2's newspaper queue. UPDATE: An Amazon spokesperson explained that "Kindle sales make up more than 10 percent of sales of books that are available in both traditional and e-book form."