Amazon's rollout of its Kindle e-book reader is reminiscent of the iPod introduction in 2001, and for that matter, of the iPhone.

The similarity in terms of media buzz and carefully controlled information leaks is no accident. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos surely doesn't mind that some journalists are calling Kindle the "iPod for books," a gadget that changes everything about reading.

I will give Bezos credit if he can, in a society that seems to be reading less all the time, create genuine excitement about books. I have my doubts that Kindle will become another iPod or, for that matter, another iPhone in terms of holiday sales. But as one who has tracked the e-book world for a long time, I do see reason for optimism that this device could nudge electronic book design forward.

The $399 Kindle is as much about communications as it is about reading. Amazon has made the tabletlike device capable of direct wireless connection to its store, where more than 90,000 books have been made available in its format.

If you need a book, you won't need a computer to get it. Simply use Kindle's keyboard to search for and find the title, then download it directly to the device.

So untethered is Kindle that it operates right out of the box, with no laborious setup to challenge you with PC-related software. Most new books go for $9.99, much lower than you pay for content designed for the Sony Reader device.

You can read that down-loaded volume with a crisp, high resolution display that uses e-ink and looks much like real paper. Because there is no backlighting, eyestrain is not the issue it used to be, and the page refresh rate on the latest screens is acceptable, though the sudden blacking out and re-emergence of your text still takes a bit of getting used to.

But back to that wireless connection for a moment. It operates through the Amazon WhisperNet high-speed wireless network, and its most notable feature may be that Amazon foots the bill. That allows not just easy book downloading but the ability to make annotations in your books and save them on Amazon's servers. The wireless connection can be shut down as needed, but if you leave it on, a second feature kicks in: automatic updating.

Amazon isn't viewing Kindle as just a book reader. It's offering monthly subscriptions to major U.S. and overseas newspapers, as well as magazine and Web log subscriptions. Depending on the newspaper, you might pay $5.99 to $14.99 per month, with lower charges on magazines. With wireless capability enabled, Kindle sucks up all the new content overnight so that when you get up in the morning, the latest news is waiting for you.

I keep hearing that there is no reason for electronic books. After all, even if you can carry 200 titles with you in a small device, how many books do you actually read at the same time? Presumably, we should bring computing power to bear on books for some reason other than simply reducing the amount of weight we carry.

But Amazon seems to have figured out that electronic books can offer something that paper volumes cannot. Kindle can access the New Oxford American Dictionary as well as the complete Wikipedia. Moreover, your content is searchable, and like the Sony device and the new Bookeen reader (www.bookeen.com) will handle a range of formats, although some need to be translated into readable form.

That latter process, involving e-mail and potential charges, is kludgy. I'd like to be able to simply transfer HTML, Mobipocket, MS Word and TXT files for nonprotected content straight to the device, not to mention working with PDF and other possible formats.

What Kindle doesn't have that the iPod does is looks. A tablet with keyboard built- in, the little gadget is just plug ugly, homely as a fire hydrant.

Another difference: The iPod offers good sound quality. The ebook analog to that is readable text, but even with that in place, Kindle can't give you the font choices you find in paper books. It's nice to be able to adjust font size, but one of the things that makes real books so interesting is that they look different from one another because of the wide variety of typefaces.

Let's throw in the elephant in the room: Protected content. The book I buy from Amazon won't work on any other e-book device. (If the Kindle fails in the market, I'll lose any content I've bought.) It's a failing the industry is eventually going to have to overcome.

But given all that -- and these problems are not unique to Amazon -- I see much to like in what Bezos and company have done here. Kindle offers enough pluses to give the e-book industry a second (or perhaps third) wind, pointing to future tuneups of the design that can bring more display options while leveraging available computer power.

It's not the iPod of books, but I think you'll be seeing a lot of Kindle.

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