Amazon Kindle 2: A Great Idea For Books Just Got Better

I love a good book. If it's an engaging fiction or a truly interesting non-fiction, I'm a captive page turner until I finish. And, part of my love of books has always been the mechanics of that page turning, the ink on paper, a good reading font, etc. However, I also appreciate technological developments. And Amazon, the worlds largest online bookseller who merged books with tech, giving us the Kindle Wireless Reader over a year ago..are about to unleash the Kindle 2.

The Kindle's straightforward purpose of downloading, storing and displaying a book with easy-to-read text hasn't exactly taken the world by storm yet, but the Kindle 2's improvements over its predecessor may change that.

The Kindle 2 is roughly the same height and width, yet definitely thinner, the display resolution has been sharpened and improved, and the page refresh speed has been punched up a bit. It will download a book in 60 seconds from a selection of over 230,000 books, and can store more than 1,500 of them. It does offer newspapers, magazines, and even blogs over its wireless connection as well.

The Amazon Kindle 2 will be released Tuesday, February 24 with a retail price of $359. I know it sounds a little steep (definitely out of my league right now), but considering the benefits of such a device, it's worth considering for serious readers.

Find out more by visiting Gizmodo's First Hands-on with the Kindle 2, then head over to the Kindle 2 page at Amazon.

Coming Soon: Desktop docks for PC users, Gmail keeps cranking out new features, An online fix for lost product owner manuals