Today is the Day of the Book, in part spurred by the urge to recognize two of the great progenitors of modern literature, William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, who both died on 23 April 1616, at least according to the official history. Their work and the various arts that go into making books, as such, are celebrated around the world as staples of modern global civilization and the human element of culture. But the book is more than those sweeping historical energies; it is a concrete, observable register of intent and of meaning, which carries evidence of our humanity forward and informs and improves future worlds.

The deepest image ever taken of the universe, using the ultra-powerful Hubble Space Telescope, known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, shows there to be 100 billion galaxies in the universe, some projecting light from a distance of 47 billion light years. A study of the Doppler redshift of galaxies speeding away from the Hubble’s vantage point has allowed astronomers to create a 3-dimensional projection of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, the deepest photograph ever taken of the observable universe.

Like the Amazon Kindle family of e-readers, the Sony Reader Touch Edition uses an e-Ink e-paper display. But it’s interface works like a touchscreen. The advance is a major improvement for the standards of design in e-paper e-book readers. The touchscreen standard may be the most significant challenge Sony has put forth for the Amazon Kindle readers, none of which uses a touchscreen interface.

Now, we face unprecedented challenges to the right of people everywhere to access information intended for public consumption. Repressive governments are building state-of-the-art censorship , tracking and filtering mechanisms (the ‘Great Firewall of China’, for example), and internet service providers (ISP) are seeking to establish profit-dr… that limit users’ access to certain websites or content-producers.

The Amazon Kindle DX is a beautiful device. Its design is user-friendly, intuitive and cohesive. It is clean-edged, minimal and thinner than many major magazines. Its format size is comfortable and makes tactile sense; it feels like something you hold in order to read, giving it a useful aesthetic kinship to books or magazines, a vast improvement on smaller e-reading devices. It is, in point of fact, far more comfortable than planting yourself in front of a computer monitor to read large amounts of text.