I want to take a moment to talk up a great Xmas gift. I just used it for about an hour and a half--and without moving I was able to read a chapter of Thubron's The Silk Road, a few chapters of Notes from the Underground; I was able to check FB several times and play Scrabble, I looked at the news, watched a substantial part of a film called Ip Man, watched part of Persona on Netflix streaming, and downloaded for free or pennies a copy of The Secret History by Procopious and a history called The Fall of the Roman Empire. Then I downloaded in seconds novels by Ian McEwan and William Styron.

Pretty cool!

Of course it's not an iPad; you won't create a lot on the Fire. But you can easily highlight text in your books and look up words and make marginal notes. And yes, Amazon is a competition-killing behemoth. We should watch it carefully.

But, pretty cool!