Newsweek‘s latest cover story sails perilously close the rocks of “advertorial” with its coverage of the new “wireless reading device,” Amazon Kindle.(On the Amazon page for Kindle, they’ve managed to rope in Nobel laureate Toni Morrison to help flog the $400 device–although at the rate the dollar’s falling that price might not seem so steep for anyone paid in Euros.)The Newsweek article tries to elevate the significance of its subject matter by taking a biggest-thing-since-Gutenberg slant. So (the?) Kindle isn’t just another iPhone-style cooler-than-thou gadget (it’s considerably uglier for starters)–it’s a part of wave of technology that will change the very way we read, write, and publish. And thus, presumably, change the way we think.But there’s always the question of how filthy lucre fits into the scheme of things. The brief discussion of how digitised, wireless, “always-on,” e-Ink-enabled publishing might spur new business models doesn’t exactly encourage bibliophiles to ululate with joy:

The model other media use to keep prices down, of course, is advertising. Though this doesn’t seem to be in Kindle’s plans, in some dotcom quarters people are brainstorming advertiser-supported books. “Today it doesn’t make sense to put ads in books, because of the unpredictable timing and readership,” says Bill McCoy, Adobe’s general manager of e-publishing. “That changes with digital distribution.”

Well I suppose those brainstorming inhabitants of “dotcom quarters” are usually good at judging what the public will swallow.