My test for a potential successor to the book is whether you can read it in the bath. With a Kindle, that is probably not a good idea, unless you want to risk your $399.

The hi-tech device is a pleasing wedge shape that feels like a paperback book. The left side is about as thick as a book’s spine while the right side is thinner, like opened pages.

The electronic screen does not dazzle the eye the way backlit computers or mobile “smart phones” do, but it is annoyingly small: only six inches diagonally. Inexplicably, the most important part of the device covers only two thirds of the front. That is tolerable if you can read fairly small print. But if you set the text size to one of the larger options, you get only a couple of paragraphs at a time.

You cannot scroll down. You can only flip the page. That means, with large type you have to turn the page thousands of times.

The rest of the device’s precious space is taken up with a full “qwerty” keyboard, along with numbers 1-10 and function keys. These fiddly buttons seem slightly quaint in this age of touch-screen keypads.

No doubt it could be convenient on holiday, for instance, to have 200 books in a single device. It would certainly save room in the carry-on bag. Also, the Kindle can handle rudimentary e-mail and digital music – but you would still have to pack your phone and digital camera (which, by now, are probably combined). I think Amazon made a mistake pursuing a single-purpose device.

My overwhelming sense after playing with the Kindle is that it is too little, too late to keep up with the surging technology on display in such products as the iPhone. When I browsed The New York Times, the photographs came up in murky tones of black and white, because the Kindle does not offer colour.

Perhaps I’ll drop it in the bath anyway.

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