Faster Forward

If you spend enough time in front of a computer at home or the office, you can expect to hear one or more relatives make this request over the Thanksgiving weekend: "Hey, do you mind taking a look at my computer to make sure it's working alright?"

So for the past few years, I've been trying to ease that task by suggesting tools to fix current problems and prevent future ones. See, for example, my advice for 2008, 2007 and 2006.

Since most computing problems don't change that much year over year, this year's advice doesn't depart significantly from last year's:

* As before, your first priority should be getting a good backup of the data already on the computer. Pack a USB flash-memory drive with plenty of capacity--4-gigabyte models now sell at commodity prices--or get a cheap external hard drive. I reviewed backup software in late 2008; most of those recommendations still stand, but if your folks run Windows 7 they have a pretty good backup program included with that operating system.

* In the increasingly unlikely even that your hosts only have dial-up Internet access, save a copy of the latest comprehensive security update for their computer--usually, a download measured in hundreds of megabytes--on the drive you'll bring. If they run Windows XP, you'll need Microsoft's Service Pack 3 update; if they're on Vista, get the Service Pack 2 installer. If they have a Mac, ask them to select "About This Mac" from the Apple-icon menu at the top left of its screen and tell you its version of OS X and if it has an Intel or PowerPC processor, then bring the appropriate "combo update" download--Apple's Mac OS X 10.4.11, 10.5.8 or 10.6.2.

* If you'll be tending to a Windows PC, pack an anti-virus program on that drive too. You can run the portable edition of the free, open-source ClamWin right off a flash drive, but for ongoing protection I now recommend Microsoft's free (and nag-free) Microsoft Security Essentials. (Read my follow-up Q&A blog post about this program before installing it, though.)

* If your relatives have even vague thoughts about upgrading to Windows 7, run Microsoft's free Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor on their computer to check for hardware or software conflicts.

* Finally, upgrade their Web browser and its plug-ins (do I have to link, yet again, to my sermon about the obsolescence of Internet Explorer 6? Oops, I just did.). Mozilla Firefox makes a fine all-around browser in Windows or on a Mac that can't run Apple's current Safari 4. On an older, slower Windows machine, try Google's Chrome or Opera's eponymous browser instead. Then you'll need to update the major Web plug-ins, as any of these can be subject to attack by hostile sites. Windows users will need the latest versions of Adobe's Reader and Flash Player, Sun's Java and Apple's QuickTime; Mac users will need an up-to-date release of Flash (Mac OS X handles Java, PDF and QuickTime chores on its own).

* Don't rule out being asked for help with a new digital-TV setup. If your folks watch TV over the air, remember to have their set or converter box's tuner rescan the airwaves for any channel changes. And make sure they've got the right cables plugged in behind the set--you don't want to see a high-definition source, like a cable box or upconverting DVD player, hooked up to the set with a standard-definition S-Video or, worse yet, composite video cable. (It's best to pack a spare HDMI cable, just in case.)

Got other suggestions for turkey-day computing help? Have stories to tell of past adventures or misadventures in family tech support? Share your experience in the comments...

If you've been wondering why some people have started walked around while holding a smartphone a foot in front of their face, today's column may explain the phenomenon.

My story covers something called "augmented reality." That might sound like something you experience after knocking back a few beers, but in the realm of smartphone software it can be a lot more useful. By superimposing links to Web resources on a phone camera's view of your surroundings, these applications give you a way to inform yourself about the world around you that's both giggle-inducing and elegantly simple.

As Yelp's iPhone product manager Eric Singley explained, an augmented-reality interface like Yelp's Monocle can be both a "a party trick" and a big help anytime you're not sure of the nearest street address.

After playing around with a few "AR" apps -- first on Google Android phones, where most of these programs have debuted, and then on an iPhone 3GS -- I've decided that my next phone will need to have this capability. It's just too interesting, and too useful, to give up that option.

(So much for the otherwise appealing Palm Pre; the AR developers I spoke to said that device wouldn't work for their software, and most also said writing for BlackBerry or Windows Mobile phones would be difficult or impossible. On a related note, please disregard my earlier characterization of the iPhone 3GS's compass as "less useful.")

If you have an Android device or an iPhone 3GS, I'd suggest you start with the free Layar, pictured above, and play around with some of the data layers available under its "Featured" and "Popular" tabs -- say, Yelp, "Tweeps Around," Sunlight Labs' Recovery.gov and Wikipedia.

For more info on this topic, have a look at a good essay the Economist ran in September that helped shape my thoughts on this subject. (While I'm handing out credit, I ought to thank the folks at the MIT Club of Washington, whose invitation to speak about future smartphone developments got a few wheels turning in my head.)

You should also set aside time to read a science-fiction novel, Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End," which describes a world in which augmented-reality "overlays" provided by computerized contact lenses and clothing have become both an art form and a shared experience of "belief circle" communities. (Note: I haven't finished reading it myself, so, please, no spoilers in the comments.) In an e-mail, Layar developer Maarten Lens-FitzGerald cited that 2006 work as a key influence: "This book, apart from being an entertaining novel, can also be read as a near future scenario about how the world might be working in 10 years time. It gave us [...] some good insight about where we are headed."

Update: I'd e-mailed Vinge Thursday morning to ask for his $.02 worth on the topic. His reply arrived Friday night; in it, he noted that he had, "alas," not tried any AR programs yet, then offered some context for his technological forecast.

I think overlays depend on improvements in two technologies:

(1) wearable display devices,

(2) accurate location and direction-of-look information.

When I was writing _Rainbows End_ (and the earlier story it is based on,"Fast Times at Fairmont High" (2001)), I probably thought mass-market versions would come around 2012-2017. Thus I was surprised (and pleased :-) to see such apps already.

I suspect the fast progress is not so much because of changes in underlying hardware trends as it is that developers realize what a big win augmented realities can be -- and so they have figured out how to get the basic effect with much more limited versions of (1) and (2) than had earlier been thought necessary.

Hopefully, the current versions will now inspire popular demand for improvements in (1) and (2).

So here we've gone from sci-fi to shipping code in under three years. Have you tried any of these programs yourself? Which ones would you recommend? What sort of Web data would you like to see presented in an augmented-reality interface next? The comments are yours...

Earlier today, Google gave a detailed presentation about Chrome OS, the open-source, Web-centric operating system -- built around its Chrome browser -- that it announced in July to general excitement among tech types.

During an event at their Mountain View, Calif., campus, Google developers and executives outlined the basic structure of this operating system, intended for use on small, lightweight netbooks:

* It will, in fact, feature only one conventional program, Google's Chrome browser (plus a few browser plug-ins, such as Adobe's Flash and Acrobat).

* It's built to boot up as quickly as possible, going from a cold start to online in about 10 seconds.

* From then on, you'll be able to run any Web-based program you want. The browser will also be able to play or display your own music, movies, photos and e-books.

* Chrome OS will synchronize your Web-hosted data to flash memory, then encrypt that local copy to prevent a laptop thief from getting to your information.

* The operating system will restrict the access of every other program on the system to prevent malware attacks and will verify its own integrity every time it boots up.

* You won't be able to install Chrome OS on a current netbooks; Chrome netbooks will need to meet some hardware requirements, such as only using flash memory instead of hard drives, then they ship about a year from now.

For more details, see the reporting of MG Siegler, who live-blogged the event for TechCrunch, and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who provided a more technically oriented writeup of the Webcast for Computerworld .

You can also listen to the whole thing in Real or Windows Media at Google's site. Or check out its introductory videos, technical documentation, and full source-code downloads.

Does this sound like an appealing concept as described, or do you have enough Google in your life already?

All of my recent reviews of phones running Google's Android software have had to include one yes-but line, words to the effect of: Yes, this is a smart little device, but you can't sync it to an iTunes music library.

That's as much Apple's fault as it is Google's or individual phone manufacturers'. Although Apple once supported some non-iPod players in iTunes, it now goes out of its way to stop other devices from connecting to its music program. But Google and such device vendors as Motorola haven't shipped extra software to bridge this gap either.

That leaves users on their own, and I'd like to provide some assistance in a future Help File column. Assuming you want to synchronize a randomly chosen set of songs to the device (which I see as a necessity if your music library exceeds your phone's storage), I see three basic options:

* An iTunes plug-in of some sort -- for instance, the free, Windows-only iTunes Agent -- that coaxes iTunes into syncing with an Android phone as if it were an iPod. (Upside: No need to learn any new music programs. Possible downsides: This might be a Windows- or Mac-only solution, and any iTunes update could break this kind of software.)

* A separate program to supplement or replace iTunes, such as the free Songbird or the still-in-beta DoubleTwist, both available for Windows and Mac OS X. Microsoft's Windows Media Player could be another option, although older versions can't play AAC music files. (This probably can't be broken by an iTunes update, but people have to remember to switch programs for each sync or dump iTunes permanently. ... I know some people who will consider that last point a desirable feature.)

* Setting up some sort of script to automate copying a given iTunes playlist to an Android device, as outlined in this post on an Android users' forum. (This, too, should be unaffected by any iTunes updates, but it might also be Mac-specific -- there's no Windows equivalent to Apple's crafty Automator script-writing tool -- and would also require running a separate application at each sync.)

So this question goes out to Android users: Which of these options have you used? Which would you recommend, especially to a non-technical user? Is there another way to do this that you'd suggest?

Satellite-based Internet access suffers from a reputation as the broadband of last resort: It should work anywhere with a clear view of the southern sky, but it's expensive, it's slow, it limits your use, it can suffer the same "rain fade" as satellite TV, and the 44,472-mile round trip data takes to and from a satellite parked in geosynchronous Earth orbit hobbles many interactive services.

That image doesn't exactly excite potential customers. It also makes it easy for government officials charged with expanding broadband coverage to overlook satellite service. And so the largest satellite Internet provider, Germantown-based Hughes Network Systems, spent Monday and Tuesday demonstrating current and upcoming services in a suite at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel -- next door to the offices of the Federal Communications Commission.

When I stopped by late Monday afternoon, the first thing the company's reps wanted to communicate was, "Hey, we're not that bad." For the occasion, they said Hughes had set up a dish on the hotel's roof and split that connection among a variety of devices: a handful of computers logged into such streaming-media services as an Internet video call and Pandora's Web-radio service, a phone hooked up to an Internet-calling service and a Blu-ray player streaming a high-definition Netflix movie to a flat-panel TV.

The videoconferencing and VoIP showed a lag of maybe half a second between my saying something and the other person hearing it: notable but not too bothersome. The laws of physics ensure that you'll always have some latency to contend with in a satellite service; the executives at the demo agreed fast-paced "twitch" games wouldn't work for that reason, but said Hughes had helped developers of some interactive programs, such as Citrix's remote-login software, tweak their applications to function better over high-lag connections.

Everything else seemed to perform as it would in a garden-variety cable or DSL setup. The Hughes reps credited the amount of bandwidth available to the Spaceway 3 satellite launched last year, which allows for download speeds of up to 5 million bits per second (Mbps) and uploads of up to 1 Mbps.

Those speeds cost a lot more than under cable or DSL, though. While Hughes's basic connection starts at $59.99 a month for 1 Mbps down and 128,000 bits per second (Kbps) up, a full 5 Mbps download will run $349.99 a month. The required receiver hardware is expensive as well, at $399.98 before mail-in rebates to buy or $9.99 a month, plus a $99 upfront fee, to rent.

Hughes's primary competitor in the U.S., WildBlue, offers similar service plans up to 1.5 Mbps but doesn't match Hughes's faster speeds.

(Both companies engage in the irritating habit of requiring visitors to plug in a Zip code before seeing prices. I used The Post's 20071 at Hughes's site; WildBlue said no service was available there, so I plugged in Zip codes from rural Nevada and Texas instead.)

Then you have to factor in the "Fair Access Policy" of Hughes, which throttles back the connections of users who download more than 200 megabytes of data a day. WildBlue's policy is based on slightly more complex math, as laid out in a PDF on its site.

That can be a tough sell to consumers, and the Obama administration's broadband visionaries may not be too keen on it either.

In terms of specific policy goals, Hughes would like to see the government adjust its broadband-deployment incentives to reward area-wide services such as theirs -- possibly through subsidies to individual customers -- instead of focusing on town- or county-specific deployments.

Hughes promises faster connections through the Jupiter 1 satellite it plans to launch in 2012. That should offer downloads up of to 20 Mbps, although uploads will continue to top out at 1 Mbps. Marketing vice president Arunas Slekys said service and hardware prices would probably match today's, but with much faster speeds -- he suggested a starter plan could offer 3 or 5 Mpbs down and 1 Mbps up. Like today's service, this one will require a .98-meter (roughly 3.2 feet) dish and professional installation to lock it onto the satellite's signal.

And what about the FAP that so many satellite users have complained to me about? "Obviously we'll have more bandwidth to work with," Slekys said, but "there will be some form of constraint."

Between now and 2012, many things could change -- for example, wireless carriers will have had plenty of time to roll out longer-distance services running on the 700 MHz spectrum acquired in recent FCC auctions.

I'd like to hear from current satellite-Internet subscribers: Would you describe your service as the broadband of last resort, or would you rank it higher? What's your take on possible improvements like the ones Hughes described to me?

Yesterday, the Oxford University Press announced its 2009 Word of the Year: "unfriend."

For the dwindling minority of Internet users who haven't at least looked at a social-networking site like Facebook, the verb refers to the act of removing somebody from your "friends list" -- the contingent of people whose news appears when you log into the site.

The OUP, publisher of the New Oxford American Dictionary, chose that verb for its clarity and relative novelty:

"It has both currency and potential longevity," notes Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for Oxford's U.S. dictionary program. "In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most "un-" prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar "un-" verbs (uncap, unpack), but "unfriend" is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of "friend" that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal."

It beat out such other contenders as "hashtag," "netbook" "freemium," "birther" and "tramp stamp." As well it should -- now that the leading social network, Facebook, has seen its user base exceed 300 million people, friends lists have gotten out of hand and overwhelmed Facebookers have had to do some pruning.

(Unsurprising confession: I'm among them. Unsurprising outcome: One of the unfriended parties noticed the change almost immediately. Awk-ward.)

Unfriending isn't the only only remedy for an overloaded friends list, however. You can use Facebook's "Hide" option to block a particular friend's status updates from showing up in your News Feed. You can then adjust your privacy settings so this poor sap won't see any of your updates either, leaving only the faintest thread of e-friendship between you two.

But what's the word for all that? "Hiding" doesn't convey how you wall off the other person from your own updates. "Disappearing" the faux-friend? No, that has many shades of 1970s South American military dictatorships. There has to be a precise verb for this -- and if we can coin it here, maybe we can all take credit for inventing 2010's word of the year.

Yesterday, Palm shipped the second device to run the webOS operating system it debuted this summer. Its new Pixi smartphone offers many of the same features as its Pre at a lower cost -- but in the six months since that gadget shipped, Palm's competitive position has eroded.

Like the Pre, the Pixi combines a miniaturized physical keyboard with a sharp touchscreen that responds to iPhone-esque gestures -- spread two fingers apart to zoom into a Web page or map, pinch two together to zoom out. Its Web browser, like the software on its older brother, the iPhone and devices running on Google's Android software (all sharing the same open-source code framework), easily displays full-sized Web pages.

But the Pixi is a good deal thinner, at 0.43 inches, and cheaper, at $199.99 before a $100 mail-in rebate from its exclusive carrier Sprint, than most of its competitors. (Walmart's Web site briefly listed it for just $30 but now asks $49.99 for the device.) Despite the more compact dimensions, Palm touts the same five-hour talk time for the Pixi as for the Pre; my initial use of a loaner Pixi suggests that figure is true.

That cheaper price brings some tradeoffs, though. The Pixi doesn't have the Pre's WiFi wireless networking, includes a lower-resolution camera and features a significantly smaller screen. That 2.63-inch display may fall below some users' threshold for readability and makes it tricky to hit such smaller onscreen buttons as the little menu shortcut in the top left corner.

The biggest issue with both the Pixi and the Pre, however, is their software. Palm's webOS does multi-tasking better than any other smartphone software I've seen -- it displays open programs as a series of cards on the screen, then lets you close any one of them by flicking it up off the screen. But what could be its second-best feature, the "Synergy" option of linking contacts and calendars to the records of such social-networking sites as Google, Facebook and LinkedIn, continues to suffer from an underdone implementation: You can't have only a subset of your Facebook contacts show up in a Pixi or Pre's address book. The Pixi also showed some serious slowdowns, especially with its calendar application.

Palm touts the Pre's built-in iTunes compatibility -- "use the Palm media sync feature to transfer your DRM-free iTunes music, videos and photos to your Pre" -- but makes no such promise for the Pixi. It shouldn't: Apple keeps updating iTunes to defeat the Pre and Pixi's attempts to impersonate an iPod. So while a laptop running the 9.0.1 version of iTunes synchronized music and photos to the Pixi, machines running the current 9.0.2 release ignored the phone.

Finally, there's the issue of third-party software. While the iPhone's App Store stocks more than 100,000 titles and Android's Android Market carries about 12,000, the Pre and Pixi's App Catalog only offers some 300. That number includes a few high-profile iPhone apps that have yet to show up on Android, such as Yelp, but in other cases -- for instance, the nearly useless Facebook app -- a company's webOS program is far inferior to its mobile-Web site. This is not the selection I expected to see by now when I complimented the Pre here and in my column in June. Palm says it will officially launch the App Catalog next month, but the lagging developer support so far already has some early Pre adopters questioning the viability of their purchase.

It is possible that in the under-$50 market the Pixi seems aimed at, collecting add-on applications isn't the most important thing -- out-of-the-box utility and simplicity are. In that case, the Pixi may do fine -- just as many people never bother installing more than a handful of programs on far more expensive desktops and laptops. What's your take on this? Are you more interested in a cheaper smartphone that handles the Web well enough to stop iPhone users from snickering at you, or will you pay extra to have the wider choice of aftermarket programs?

For the more than 10 years I've been writing this column, I keep coming back to copyright-policy issues, and not just because I work in Washington. Laws and court decisions constrain the hardware, software and services we buy -- this was a subject of one of my first copyright-overreach rants, back in 2000.

The fact that these legal and judicial barriers don't seem to stop software fraud (I prefer not to use the term "piracy") or even halt the distribution of tools used to unlock "protected" digital files and formats doesn't seem to stop larger copyright holders from asking for new laws to defend their interests.

That brings me to today's column, a look at an international negotiation underway for a deal called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. ACTA shares the defects of such existing, unbalanced copyright laws as the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, then wraps them up in a layer of secrecy that is at best counterproductive and at worst contemptuous.

You have to wonder how the people involved in ACTA think they're going to sell this thing to the public. How do you make the headline description "SECRET COPYRIGHT TREATY" look palatable? How do you spin a situation in which the government -- that is, our hired employees -- won't specify the goals of a negotiation done in our name and concerning our rights?

"Absurd" is the right word for this. At one point during my no-attribution-by-name interview with a "U.S. trade official" yesterday, this person complained that much of the criticism of ACTA was based on "hearsay." Well, whose fault is that?

ACTA offers plenty of potential for trouble on public-policy grounds, too. Remember, you don't necessarily need a "you shall" or "you shall not" clause in the law to coax companies to act as you'd wish when incentives can suffice; see, for example, my colleague Cecilia Kang's post this morning about possible changes afoot at Verizon. Merely cementing the DMCA's sweeping "anti-circumvention" provisions into international law seems awful enough, considering the frequent abuses they've invited here -- my favorite example of DMCA overreach being when the National Football League sought to use a since-overturned copy-control system in digital TV to enforce local TV-coverage blackouts.

I don't want to get on any more of a rant here, so let me close by noting who I contacted for the column. In addition to my interview with that trade official, I spoke with representatives of the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Consumer Electronics Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, Knowledge Ecology International, and Canadian law professor (and noted ACTA opponent) Michael Geist. I also chatted with two people who have seen the ACTA documents under a non-disclosure agreement (one with a public-interest group, the other working for a major American computing manufacturer); they didn't break their NDA but did offer useful guidance. Lastly, I checked with my former Post colleague Paul Blustein, who covered trade issues for us for years and now studies them at the Brookings Institution, to get some context about typical levels of disclosure in trade negotiations.

Does ACTA bother you or not? Let's discuss this issue in the comments -- or in today's Web chat, starting at noon.

A new proposal from some major movie studios intended to increase sales of DVDs would push back the availability of new DVD releases for Netflix subscribers and Redbox customers.

As a story from the trade journal Video Business explains, the idea is to hold back new releases from these companies for a month -- a proposition Los Gatos, Calif.-based Netflix is prepared to accept in return for a drastic cut in the prices it pays studios for new movies. Adds writer Susanne Ault: "None of the studios has agreed to drop prices as much as Netflix wants."

(Traditional rental shops don't worry the studios that much, Ault writes: "Blockbuster has been left out of the window discussion because it orders more product from the studios than Netflix and Redbox and pays a relatively high price for titles.")

The DVD-kiosk operation Redbox is not so fond of the idea. The Oakbrook Terrace, Ill,, company has instead sued Warner Home Video, Universal Studios Home Entertainment and 20th Century Fox and launched a "Save Low Cost DVDs" Web site to argue for its position.

This isn't the only potential wrinkle to the home-movie market. Under a different proposal, some movies would be offered for rent through cable video-on-demand (VOD) services before their DVD release -- but only to subscribers with digital cable boxes connected via encrypted digital connections to HDTVs. This requirement would block access to viewers with older sets lacking these "protected" inputs.

Because the Federal Communications Commission prohibits "selectable output control," movie studios would have to get a waiver from the FCC first. This Ars Technica piece notes the Motion Picture Association of America's recent lobbying (PDF) for this waiver. The cable industry backs this idea, too; see this blog post by National Cable and Telecommunications Association President Kyle McSlarrow in favor it.

For a brief to the contrary, see Consumer Electronics Association President Gary Shapiro's Huffington Post piece this morning, which notes the history of earlier Hollywood attempts to close the "analog hole" by requiring locked digital connections.

Both the delayed-DVD-rental scheme and this SOC-for-VOD trade-off strike me as foolish ideas for the same reason. Adding yet another "release window" to Hollywood's miserably Balkanized, Byzantine and bureaucratic movie-distribution system can only serve to create more holes in the market for unauthorized downloading to fill. Movie studios won't make anything extra off those viewings, while home viewers will become accustomed to looking outside legitimate channels.

Netflix, Redbox viewers: What's your take on the possibility of a month's delay in the arrival of new releases? Cable subscribers: Would you pay to watch a new release ahead of time on VOD, even if you couldn't watch it on some TVs?

Amazon turned a page in its electronic-book story yesterday with the overdue release of a program to read Kindle e-books on some regular computers, without first having to buy one of the Seattle retailer's $259-and-up Kindle e-reader tablets.

The new Kindle for PC software -- a free download for Windows XP, Vista and 7, with a Mac version "coming soon" -- fills a space in Amazon's e-book portfolio that's bothered me since the debut of the first Kindle reader. But it also looks and works like a first draft, even more so than its "Beta" label would suggest.

Like Amazon's earlier Kindle for iPhone program, Kindle for PC downloads older purchases in seconds, lets you buy other Kindle titles using your regular Web browser, and remembers the last page you read in a title and synchronizes your progress to other Kindle devices and programs. It also matches that phone program's limits in its lack of a text-search function and its inability to show newspaper, magazine or blog subscriptions purchased on the Kindle Store.

But unlike Amazon's iPhone app, this program doesn't let you add notes or highlights to a book; you can only view those created earlier.

The reading experience suffers somewhat in Kindle for PC, thanks to its lack of a full-screen mode that could hide such distractions as the Windows taskbar and its various system-notification alerts and icons. (The same problem exists in Barnes & Noble's desktop e-book software.) At least you can flip through pages -- with a tap of the space bar or the cursor-arrow keys -- a lot faster than on a Kindle device, and you also get a choice of 10 font sizes and the ability to widen or narrow the onscreen page.

A "Menu" button on Kindle for PC's home screen offers a short list of commands and options that includes one somewhat disturbing default setting: "Automatically install updates when they are available without asking me." A "Future improvements..." menu item leads to a page on Amazon's site listing such possibilities as text search, creating notes and highlights on the computer, and zooming or rotating images -- but not text-to-speech or printing.

(Fortunately, the old Print Screen key still works for that last option.)

If you've already Kindled your reading, what do you think this software could do to enhance the experience? If you've yet to buy into the e-book thing, does the arrival of software like Kindle for PC change your mind? The comments are yours...