The PC era ended this morning at ten o’clock Pacific time, when Steve Jobs stepped onto a San Francisco stage to unveil the iPad, Apple’s version of a tablet computer. Tablets have been kicking around for a decade, but consumers have always shunned them. And for good reason: They’ve been nerdy-looking smudge-magnets, limited by their cumbersome shape and their lack of a keyboard. Tablets were a solution to a problem no one had.

That New York Times piece on Roger Ailes I mentioned before also featured this quote from the Fox News executive waxing populist:

The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future

By Robert Darnton

(Public Affairs, 218 pp., $23.95)

On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books & Bookstores

By Jean-Luc Nancy

Translated by David Wills

(Fordham University Press, 59 pp., $16)

I.

The airplane rises from the runway. Bent, folded, and spindled into the last seat in coach class--the one that doesn’t really recline--I pull my Kindle out of the seat pocket in front of me, slide the little switch, and lose myself in Matthew Crawford’s story of his passage from policy wonk to motorcycle mechanic. The gritty world of his workshop takes shape as I read. The airplane noise fades away, the pain in my cramped knees almost disappears, my eyes cease to blink. I am Kindled. It is by no means the first time. These days, in fact, I spend a lot of my time that way.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

By Alice Schroeder

(Bantam Books, 960 pp., $35)

Scenes from the Internet revolution in scholarship: It is late at night, and I am at home, in my study, doing research for a book on the culture of war in Napoleonic Europe. In an old and dreary secondary source, I find an intriguing but fragmentary quotation from a newspaper that was briefly published in French-occupied Italy in the late 1790s. I want to read the entire article from which it came. As little as five years ago, doing this would have required a forty-mile trip from my home in Baltimore to the Library of Congress and some tedious wrestling with a microfiche machine.