If you enjoy reading Kindle-brand electronic books on your iPhone or iPad, you've surely had moments when the best idea seems to be just erasing all your ebooks. There's something about the shoddy copy-editing and optical-character-recognition errors and lame single jpeg of cover art and terribly rendered illustrations that really puts a spotlight on the bad corporate non-fiction titles you've somehow spent $13 a piece to accumulate "in the cloud." Wouldn't it just be better if Kindle developed a "killer app" that would erase all of this garbage?

"In shipping the latest version, apparently the company's QA testers somehow missed a bug that can delete your entire book collection from [...]

This is exactly what Amazon wants: cheap, ubiquitous devices that run their digital media stores. Because while most people focus on the purchase price, buying a Kindle is a lot like buying a game console: it’s not very useful until you spend more money feeding it with content, and Amazon takes a cut of all content sales.

From the cables to the screen to the ads it serves, the new $79 Kindle is cheap in every way, which in the end perhaps becomes a virtue: it's on the way to becoming disposable. (Well, for the 1%, obviously.)

There is a new Kindle reader. It is larger than the previous one. It will cost $489. You can pre-order it now (sorry, "reserve your place on line"), although it won't be available until summer. Will it save the newspaper industry? Too soon to tell. But so far it has certainly done wonders for the liveblogging the new Kindle press conference industry.

Having trouble with iCloud? Confused by CrashPlan? Today's smart tech consumers are getting ready to purchase the sturdiest backup media of all: human DNA. The mad scientists behind a weird new study say that the double helix of genetic code has been successfully used to store all kinds of documents, including audio files and text of Shakespeare's sonnets and "a picture of their office," because most of what we digitally save is silly garbage. (Future archeologists will likely be baffled by the discovery of, say, a flash drive holding nothing but hundreds of weirdly filtered pictures of somebody's entrée with a glass of wine in the background. "These [...]

You know the panicky, paranoid manner in which the Tea Partiers appear to cling to their guns and religion, as if someone really were trying to take them away? For some of us, the same condition of ongoing nerves regarding the encroaching powers of the State comes instead from a V for Vendetta- or Fahrenheit 451-type terror of the State coming after our books. Various States have indeed come after all of these assets, from time to time, so it’s not like any of us is entirely making this stuff up. At this very moment they don’t let Chinese people or Cubans or Belarusians or many, many others [...]

So Amazon announced a bunch of new Kindles. What does it all mean? Find out here.

On Monday Choire discussed Nicholson Baker's New Yorker piece about the Kindle. I finally got around to reading the thing last night, and while I am in no way qualified to address the merits of his argument (I'm enough of a Luddite that I only broke down and bought a cellphone in 2006) I will say this: I need to use the word "spinnakered" more often in my writing. Also "pheromonal."