Police in Virginia arrested a teenager earlier this month after he allegedly hit his mother over the head with a frying pan for denying him the use of her Kindle.

Uber nerd website ArsTechnica has one. Amazon is guiding web savvy writers toward them. And now even the electronic newspaper of the future, the Huffington Post, has one. Meet the so-called "book," heir apparent to the future of media.

It's hot in Japan, and finally coming to the U.S.: For $2 or $3 per title, you can have your book collection lovingly scanned, emailed, and ground into dust. You don't even have to dispose of the corpse. Progress!

Google wants to get into the LOLcat business, but Steve Yegge is damned if he's going to help; the engineer told a tech conference that "I am officially quitting that job on national TV." Also in today's Valleywag roundup: Google is showering programmers with 50 percent raises and trips to Paris; Karl Rove advertised…

That cute one you've had your eye on in the subway? She/he totally might have chatted you up, if you'd been reading a real book instead of a goddamned Kindle.

You've probably heard that Amazon is selling a pedophile guide called The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure. Outrage! Know what's really outrageous? Since the story broke this morning, sales of the self-published e-book have shot up by 101,000%.

The Portland, Oregon bus driver who was caught on video reading a Kindle while driving on the highway, Lahcen Qouchbane, has been fired for posing "an immediate threat to public safety." That sounds about right. [The Oregonian]

Portland, Oregon is home to Powell's, one of the country's best book stores. Portlanders love to read, and this bus driver is no exception. But, dude, how about you don't read while you're driving a bus down the highway?

Amazon.com reports that, for the past three months, sales of e-books for their Kindle device have outpaced sales of hardcover books. They sold 143 Kindle downloads for every 100 hardcover. Yeah, but can you use a Kindle as a doorstop?

Champions of the printed page, rejoice! A new study found that reading speed declines anywhere from 6.2-10.7% when using a Kindle or iPad instead of an old-fashioned book. This is probably because people keep asking to touch your iPad. [Mashable]

Amazon.com cut its Kindle price by $70 to $190, and Barnes & Noble did likewise with the Nook. This is no doubt to fend off Apple's fast-selling iPad, but should also keep people buying those high-margin $15 e-books. Clever.

Barnes & Noble is making an e-reader; Gizmodo published the first pictures today. With similar media-tech fusions out or anticipated from Amazon.com, Apple, Hearst, Time Inc. and others, it's tough to keep track. No worries; here's a list.

Is Amazon.com just trying to be creepy? It's already headed by a "chuckling maniac" being sued over defective Kindles and swindling newspapers on the e-book reader. Now his company is quietly deleting people's Kindle books. It's Orwellian. Literally.

The sensibility of all hipsters have two axes: 1. "irony" 2. "alternative". This weekend I got hipster-lit, myspace-account broker, and quirky-NYM-darling Tao Lin to help me plot current events on The Hipster Matrix.

This New York Times front-page story is about how the Amazon Kindle can't pronounce Barack Obama's name. That's A1 news? Really? The Times really is just a fancy blog. (Or maybe just feeling defensive.)

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the Kindle DX, a large-screen e-reader, today at the site of the New York Times's former headquarters in Lower Manhattan. The message: He's the future and newspapers are the past.