The future is here, though it is somewhat unevenly distributed. A few days back, Amazon unveiled Kindle Dx — roughly the size of an A4 page, it promises instant access to more than 225,000 books, plus newspapers and journals.

Last year, Virginia Heffernan of The New York Times wrote an odd tribute to the first avatar of the aggressively styleless device: the Kindle “doesn’t pulse with clocks, blaze with video or squall with incoming bulletins and demands... It’s almost like a book.” She dissed the design and the half-hearted connection to the Web, but made these sound like feats of foresight, writing approvingly that “to read on a Kindle, you still have to go, mentally, more than halfway to the experience... the screen looks dusty, like newsprint”. In other words, it is a digital device that downplays its digitality, reassuring conservative booklovers that it’s really on their side. The Onion even teased the first Kindle as “just a hollow box with a clear plastic window that you insert books into”.

But unassuming exterior aside, the Kindle is likely to set the publishing world on fire. Unlike the iPod — which was only the latest step in the progression of portable music — the Kindle, which compresses entire library carrels into a paperback-sized device, is an all-new phenomenon. And along with siblings like the Sony e-reader and Samsung’s new Papyrus or Apple’s work in progress, it is the first real challenger to the codex book, that flat thing of ink and paper that has defined literacy and, some would say, civilisation itself, for centuries.

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