Let him explain. “The number one app for the iPad when I checked a couple of days ago was called Angry Birds—a game where you throw birds at pigs and they blow up,” Bezos says. “The number one thing on the Kindle is Stieg Larsson. It’s a different audience. We’re designing for people who want to read.”

Bezos was showing me the new third-generation Kindle, which features a thinner profile and longer battery life, as well as an entry-level price ($139 for Wi-Fi only) that he hopes is low enough to turn the device into a mass-market product.

When the Kindle was introduced in November 2007, Bezos wasn’t making a stand for a gadget or for technology. He was making a stand for reading. He acknowledged the excellence of the traditional book but claimed that the Kindle fulfilled a book’s purpose as well as its printed and bound cousin did. When you get past the pulp and glue, a book is a delivery system for an author’s vision. The Kindle’s stately monochrome e-ink screen and lack of distractions were a fair emulation of a book and helped Amazon cultivate an audience of readers, leveraging its community of bookcentric users who swap reviews and receive recommendations for the next tome to purchase.

If a successful reading device is one that “falls away” and lets the author take center stage, then it doesn’t necessarily need to be a single-purpose gadget. At least not for short bursts. I’ve found that a tablet or even a smartphone can present the pages clearly and easily enough for a narrative to consume me. Amazon tacitly acknowledges this by providing Kindle apps for the iPhone, iPad, and Android in addition to PCs and Macs. Better yet, each of these syncs with the others, so they always know how far into a book you are.

But longer, deeper plunges into literature—what the critic Victor Nell calls “ludic reading”—are a different matter. After 20 minutes or so, the 1.6-pound iPad starts to feel pretty heavy. (The new Kindle is 8.7 ounces; Gravity’s Rainbow, about 2 pounds.) The backlit screen tires your eyes and is lousy in sunlight. As for smartphones, have you ever tried to hold one in a reading position for two hours? And then there are the distractions: It’s tougher to concentrate when email, box scores, and addictive games are a click away. Why struggle through a difficult passage of prose when you can play with … angry birds?

On the other hand, when it comes to newspapers and magazines—again, shorter bursts—the iPad is clearly superior to the Kindle. Bezos says he reads three papers a day in less than half an hour, but I find my daily Kindle consumption of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to be awkward. Without the iPad’s rich LCD, vivid graphics, and navigational swipes, taps, and pinches, the experience is simply unsatisfying.

Nonetheless, if you’re serious about books, you’ll need an e-reader. “You’re going to want to go on vacation and read by the pool,” Bezos says. “And guess what—many people pay more than $139 for their sunglasses. So these are not expensive devices.”

Damn, I forgot. In addition to the laptop, the iPad, and the Kindle, I’ve got to pack my sunglasses, too.

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Authors: Steven Levy

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