Epitomizing the future: the Kindle 2

From the Seattle Times on February 9th (note the bolded phrase):

There's a lot riding on Amazon.com's new Kindle electronic book reader.
The $359 gadget, unveiled Monday by Chief Executive Jeff Bezos at the Morgan Library in New York, isn't going to make the entire book world go digital. It's likely to be purchased mostly by well-off technology and book enthusiasts, the crowd who embraced the first version introduced in 2007.
But the intriguing device, and its underlying business innovations, are burnishing the Seattle company's reputation as a pioneer in online commerce.
It's also a test of whether the 14-year-old company can sustain an entirely new and complicated hardware business.
Perhaps most important for Amazon's broader business, the Kindle is an opportunity for the company to further cement relationships with book publishers and help define how books are sold in coming generations.

I'm no Luddite, I promise, but I have only now ordered a Kindle. I know lots of tech-savvy people, but only two of them are using e-readers for their books. Agents and editors in New York are, because Sony gave a lot of their readers away to get things going, and it seems to have worked. It makes so much sense, because these devices are light, compact, and can see to it you're never without something to read! But still, I have a little difficulty wrapping my brain around the Kindle helping to define how books are sold. Wow. We've all been wondering about this for a long time, but . . . It seems the future is here.