At the Borders in Brighton that Chet and I visit, they’ve had the Sony reader on the shelves for quite a while. They look good, and useful. When I travel, I carry books with me to read on the plane. Sometimes I read at the bookstore (duh). I read after exercise class. I read a lot. Having all the books in the world in a little box seems kind of neat to me.

The Sonys look very nice. However, the Amazon Kindle has something the Sony does not, the ability to get a book most anywhere there’s phone coverage. And it was less costly the last time I looked. On the other hand, in the pictures, the Kindle 1 looked plastic and far less attractive than the Sony. So I held off.

A weekor so ago, at the Borders in Ann Arbor, an aging gentleman behind us had a Kindle 1 and let us take a look. Like me, it looks a lot better in real life than in pictures. By then, though, the K1s were out of stock so there was no point taking action.

When I heard that Amazon was going to announce the Kindle 2 on February 9, I was kind of psyched. And there were spy pics up on the web, which turned out to be real pics of the unit. The new one looks nicer, though still not as nice as the Sony. But in my hand, the K1 had been OK, so surely the K2 would be good.

I was probably the third person to click the link for the Kindle 2 on the Amazon site. They will start shipping on Feb 24, and they’re going to ship them to all the people who had K1 on back order. So I have no idea when I’ll get mine but the pressure to buy it is off in any case.

I’ll report more when I get it. Here’s the look:

Kindle 2