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Today's Wilmington News Journal features an editorial about Amazon's new Kindle book reader. The piece takes a wait and see approach to the device, suggesting that it will have to improve on the inherent simplicity and elegance of traditional ink and paper books to be successful.

It's certainly an attractive enough gadget, with features like fee-less wireless and a built-in keyboard for annotating and bookmarking:

I think economy is likely going to be a larger driver to success or failure, though. And it doesn't look like Kindle is ready for prime time yet.

The Kindle itself sells for $399.00, you'd have to be a voracious reader to make that up through the discounts Amazon offers on the Kindle versions of books. Even Amazon knows this and resorts to a little subterfuge with the numbers to make it seem more attractive. For example, on the main Kindle page, Amazon suggests that you would save $17.96 by reading "The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court" by reading it electronically vs. the hardback edition. However, they use(disingenuously, I feel) list price as a comparison.

Amazon regularly sells the paper and ink version for $16.77 - so the real savings is only $6.78. In order to save money by using Amazon's device, you'd have to read 59 such books. How many hardback books do you buy in year?

But the real competition for Kindle isn't the hardback, but its cheaper cousin the paperback. Waiting the extra few months for the economy version of a book is the norm for most folks, and has the added bonus of feeling more, well, disposable. If I buy a hardback, I feel obligated to preserve and take up shelf space with it, I routinely give away paperbacks with no remorse. I don't care if they get dog-eared, worn, torn, kicked under the bed, or stained with coffee spills.

So what kind of savings will the Kindle provide against paperbacks? My lovely wife TB has a thing for J.D. Robb's work, so I checked out her titles to see. "Judgment In Death" normally sells for $7.99 in paperback, and the Kindle version sells for $6.39. Assuming similar savings for other titles, TB would have to read a staggering 249 books to make up the cost of the device alone. It would likely become worn out or obsolete first.

So do I think the Kindle is a total loser? No. Amazon will sell enough of them to keep the product alive for the near future at least. But I don't see any significant degree of market penetration. This is a product that's going to be popular with the hard-core gotta-have-the-latest-and-hippest-gadget-no-matter-what-the-price crowd. You know, the same crowd that stood in line for the iPhone, then whined because Apple dropped the price enough to diminish its exclusivity and ultimately, their bragging rights.

Perhaps that's all Amazon hopes to achieve.

That's according to an Associated Press-AOL News poll:

WASHINGTON - Increasing numbers of people looking for political news are going online — with more than a third now saying they check the Internet for such information.

That group is more likely to be younger, better educated and male than the population in general, an Associated Press-AOL News poll found.

Hey, that's me! Well, except for the younger part. Sigh.

I found this part interesting considering that both the left and right blogosphere spend a considerable amount of time and energy poking well-deserved holes in mainstream news coverage:

While the online browsers go to a wide variety of sites, they overwhelmingly trust what they see on the news sites.

That's 70% who trust news sites, according to the poll. Of course, they don't specify what defines "political web sites" that the news sites are compared with. I think it's a given that blogs are included, but there are other political web sites as well.

Still, I see this as a plus for the blogosphere. Although some days it doesn't seem that way, the news sites by and large are doing a better job than they were a few years ago because they know how much more closely they're being watched. Eo ipso, the blogs are having a larger effect than the surface numbers suggest.

That's a good thing, folks.

It also underlines the need for bloggers to continue watching and correcting. Even with their frequent errors and proclivity toward bias, the MSM will always score high on this type of poll. No group of bloggers is likely to replace AP or Reuters anytime soon.

For the vast majority of political bloggers, that translates into a hobby with job security. What color lining this gives your clouds is up to you.

This is cool:

WASHINGTON - Scientists are boldly going where only fiction has gone before — to develop a Cloak of Invisibility. It isn't quite ready to hide a Romulan space ship from Capt. James T. Kirk or to disguise Harry Potter, but it is a significant start and could show the way to more sophisticated designs.

When my kids grow up and have their own kids , hide and seek will be ever so much different.