Today’s gadget story: Amazon released the Kindle, which will let folks browse online e-book offerings and download titles in about a minute. The target niche and Amazon’s attempt to capitalize therein is tidily encapsulated in Saul Hansell’s NYT blog:

Amazon is trying to do for books what Apple has done for music. It has linked its device tightly to its own online bookstore, just as the iTunes music store is tied into the iPod. Amazon has 90,000 titles for sale at launch, including books from all major publishers.

Of what else is Kindle kapable?

It apparently can also wirelessly access newspapers, magazines, and blogs. The screen technology is breakthrough-cool; that’s real ink, suspended with some kind of crazy contemporary Etch-a-Sketch mojo!

Still, here’s a reality the Kindle will have to overcome: According to the US Census Bureau, Americans buy something like 2.4 billion books every year. Great stuff! But when I browse the stacks at B&N or Borders, I see a heck of a lot of big-picture folios of cats in trees, WWII fighter planes, and the history of Harley Davidson. Those novelty titles have to be gumming up the works, to say nothing of all the self-help schlock and celebrity-cookbooks-of-the-instant in the mix as well.

Jeff, here’s the deal: I read about three or four books a month, and to sound unashamedly snobbish, they’re real doggone books. Right now I’m re-reading No Country for Old Men (in preparation for the film) and working through Heat by Bill Buford, All the King’s Men (because it just keeps getting better), and a book of essays by British philosopher A.C. Grayling. I clock an even 50 blogs using Google Reader and subscribe to the daily and Sunday Washington Post, the New Yorker, and National Geographic. I also pick up the Sunday New York Times most weekends, and am prone to snag The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Criterion, and Ultimate Grappling (props always to Royce Gracie).

My point? Bez, I’m a reader. And not no Little Book of Moving Cheese and Making Chicken Soup or whatever. I’m talking stuff that doesn’t belong anywhere near the back of a toilet tank. Now, you turn me loose on this gizmo, and if I dig it, why, then you’ve done something truly wonderful.

What worries me is that while plenty of people buy books, not too many of those books seem to get read. And the ones that do often have somebody like Jeff Foxworthy on the cover. I just hope you know what you’re doing. I’m rooting for you.