You’d have had to be hidden under a very large interweb-proof rock to have missed the fact that Amazon have launched the Kindle, their long-anticipated wireless e-book reader device, this week.

While we at Futurismic Towers are still awaiting our evaluation devices (which the Amazon people seem to have inexplicably forgotten to mail to us), we cannot pass judgement on the reading experience the Kindle offers – though we’d agree with the consensus that it’s not the prettiest machine ever. [Image from Engadget article]

So, in the meantime, we’ll refer you to the inimitable Nick Carr, one of the most reliable contrarians of the modern age, who points out that Jeff Bezos’s vision for the Kindle is possibly the best one for the future of books as a platform:

“… Kelly and his fellow-travelers are wrong, and Bezos is right. The only thing that will keep books great is respect for the individual author, the individual reader, and the sanctity of the book as a closed container. When that respect goes, the book goes with it.”

What do Futurismic readers think? Will e-book ubiquity save the novel, or destroy it?