They’ve installed a completely new and fancier fire alarm system in the building here in Harvard Square. Sounds great, except they’re testing it over the next few days. I’m sitting here with earplugs trying to work, but since I never know when the alarm is going to sound, I’m finding it hard to concentrate. I spent most of the weekend trying to catch up on magazines: Harper’s, New Yorker, Cook’s Illustrated, The Atlantic. I’m almost there. I’m savoring The Book of Night Women by Marlon James. Apparently Maud likes it too.Not that I need her validation to read a book, but she’s got such good taste in books, I like to know what she likes. Speaking of Maud, you should read her piece on her father over at Granta.

This morning at the Tools of Change conference, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos revealed the Kindle 2.0, with the help of shill author Stephen King. The whole thing was live blogged by about a million people, but I Wired magazine has a thorough version. On a side note, is live blogged hyphenated? Anyway, the 2.0 version has a lot of new bells and whistles, some sort of text to speech thing, not to mention being smaller and lighter. It’ll even change your kitty litter! Kidding. I’m still not sure how all this is going to affect traditional book sales. Seems like it should all be open source somehow, not a closed loop format. Condalmo has a similar, if not the more elegantly expressed opinion. Is the Kindle the Betamax of e-readers?