Ok, so maybe that title is a little dramatic, but I still feel like I’ve seen something that today is so foreign to most everyone but in 5 years will be completely commonplace.

For my recent birthday my mother, who I thought I had taught never to buy me any electronics for fear of reliving the “Mapping Software incident of 2003”, on her own judgment went and bought me the new Amazon Kindle.

The Kindle, if you aren’t up to speed on it, is Amazon’s answer to the digital book. Instead of buying paper books, you download them to your Kindle and read them on the device. It uses a new “inking” technology that basically makes the pages look as if they were printed in a book. Here’s a quick CNET video on it (or you can read a great Newsweek article on the Kindle):

I was pretty skeptical about it at first but having used this for a few days, it really is very easy to read on the device. I subscribed to the Atlanta Journal & Constitution as well as the Wall Street Journal and both arrive on the Kindle before I wake up, and when I read them I don’t get that ink all over my hands like you would with a newspaper. Plus I can highlight sections on it, look up the definition of words (for the WSJ, I’m not sure the AJC knows any big words) and save content for later. It’s been a blast using it so far.

So why do I think this is something that will be commonplace in a few years? Think about going to the beach for a week and having to pack 2 or 3 books. Think about kids in school having to carry big backpacks with all their books in them. If there was a device that was easy to read on and easy to download books, why wouldn’t we all shift over to this?

But the real reason I think this is the future is because of the greenness of it. Think of all the trees that would be saved if we didn’t have to print millions of books each year. Once Al Gore gets behind this thing, it’ll be as popular as when he invented the Internet.