If you’re among the elite group that follows my Twitter stream (hi there, @wvrrgr), you’ll know that a couple of days ago I was expressing the hope that newspapers would subsidize the cost of the new Kindle for subscribers. At today’s press conference to announce the large-screen Kindle DX, I got my wish … kind of.

The New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe will indeed subsidize the $489 price for people who subscribe to their Kindle editions, but only as an experiment in areas where there’s no home delivery of the newspaper. Stephen Hills, president and general manager of the Washington Post, made it sound like an even more exclusive club than the average Twitter following, according to WSJ.com

Mr. Hills said the number of Washington Post subscribers to whom they may offer the discounted Kindle DX is in the “hundreds,” and only in a slice of Baltimore where the paper doesn’t have home delivery. The discounted price hasn’t been finalized, he said.

If the New York Times is more generous and extends the deal to anyone beyond the reach of its home delivery network, it’s easy to imagine middle Americans trafficking cut-price Kindles-plus-subscriptions to Manhattan via eBay. Otherwise, any city dwellers wanting to participate in this interesting experiment in the future of the newspaper will have to shell out a small fortune for a full-price Kindle or move home.

Just two weeks after I was complaining about the Kindle’s presentation of newspapers comes news that Amazon is launching a larger-screen version on Wednesday. New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger will share the stage with Amazon’s Chief Executive Jeffrey Bezos at the launch event, according to the Wall Street Journal, which also says that students in some universities will replace their textbooks with the new device.

My colleague and fellow new Kindle owner Felix Salmon likes Amazon’s presentation of newspapers more than I do and has high hopes for the new version, but Om Malik says even an improved device can’t save the newspaper industry.

I’ve been playing with the Amazon Kindle for a little over a week now and while I’m sold on its superiority to printed books it’s no replacement for the newspaper. It’s not so much that the black and white screen renders pictures as murky as a Rorschach inkblot as the fact that there is no easy way to skim through the paper. You can jump between sections via a home page that acts like a very basic website navigation, but there’s no obvious way to navigate within a section. The International link, for example, takes you to the first article in that section. You can see the headline of the next article at the bottom of the page and jump straight to it, but that’s all. There’s no list of all the articles in the section. The only way to skim the headlines is to move forward one article at a time.

This serial navigation is how most of us read print newspapers and has no place as the only option for an electronic edition. But it got me thinking about the ideal features of an electronic newspaper. Obviously you want the freedom to navigate through the content as you wish, but serial navigation has its advantages. One of the pleasures of print is when you turn the page to find a interesting article that you would never have jumped to by choice. The serendipity factor doesn’t feel as high on the traditional newspaper website, despite the plethora of Editor’s Choice modules and Most Read lists.

There’s also a sense of accomplishment in reaching the last page of a print paper and the reassurance that you’ve seen “all the news that’s fit to print.” You’d have to click a few hundred “next article” links to achieve that on a website. So while NYT.com is a far better electronic newspaper than the Kindle version, its lack of an elegant serial navigation path means it’s imperfect.

The paper’s iPhone app is closer to my ideal, although like many people I find it crashes frequently. You can skim a headline list with the flick of a finger and it’s as easy to move forwards within a section as it is to jump between them. It’s readable despite the small screen size and will be a joy on a bigger iPod Touch.

My favorite version of the newspaper, however, is Times Reader, a PC application that it launched in 2006. The landscape screen layout evokes the print edition and you can navigate both randomly via the mouse or serially via the arrow keys or mouse wheel. The article pages have clean three-column layouts with big pictures. Headlines fade to gray when you’ve read an article, so like the print edition you always have a sense of your progress through the paper. It costs the same as the Kindle edition, $15 a month, although it’s free if you’re a print subscriber. Best of all worlds? Possibly.

In what could be the technology world’s equivalent of the first peanut butter and jelly sandwich, gadget makers are working to combine two of their most successful innovations of recent years. They’re spreading touch-screen technology on top of netbooks to create devices that could become as popular as America’s laziest lunch. The creators include Apple, which is widely expected to launch an iPod with a 10-inch touchscreen this year.

Netbooks, which we wrote about here for anyone who needs a primer, have proven wildly popular because of their low prices and quick start-up times. They appeal to people who want a computer just to read their email, check the weather forecast or read the New York Times. In other words, all the things you can do on an iPhone. The iPhone and its cousin the iPod Touch are, in essence, netbooks with small screens and no keyboards.

For some people, the lack of a physical keyboard on the iPhone is a deal-breaker. So a larger screen device without a keyboard might seem even less appealing. But as anyone who has tried to watch a video or read a website while balancing a computer on their lap knows, a keyboard can be a hindrance when its presence compromises how you can position the screen. A touch controlled device with a screen big enough to read a newspaper or book comfortably is, to my mind, the ideal form factor for the morning commute and weekends on the patio. Amazon’s Kindle application will make a whole lot more sense on a large-screen iPod.

TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington feels so passionately about this type of netbook that he’s developing his own product that he hopes to sell for $300. Such competition could eat into whatever premium Apple hopes to charge for its version. That would help get prices to a level where they become as common among commuters as the iPod. Just be sure to keep your PB&J sandwich away from the screen.

Amazon’s Kindle application for the iPhone

Bookshops still have many advantages over Amazon.com: they let you pretend that going to the mall is an intellectual pursuit; it’s much easier to judge a book by its cover when you can pick it up before you buy it (embossed letters! amusing cut-outs!); and they are one of the few places where the unattached can use pick-up lines that name-check Dostoevsky. But perhaps the most compelling reason why many of us still depend on our local Barnes & Noble is the instant gratification. The prices on Amazon may be cheaper, but there are times when you absolutely have to have that copy of 1001 Dostoevsky Pick-up Lines now.

For some people, however, that trade-off is no longer a dilemma. These people are the lucky owners of a Kindle, the Amazon electronic book reader, which gives them discount prices plus the instant gratification of over-the-air delivery. For them, buying from Amazon is quicker than going to the bookshop.

It was this realization that most impressed me soon after I unpacked the Kindle that arrived at my home this week. I’ll spare the world another in-depth review of the device, which disappeared into my wife’s handbag as soon as she could prise it from my fingers, but I haven’t read much about how over-the-air delivery increases the existential threat to bookstores.

The Kindle, with its black and white screen, is never going to replace travel guides and other books that rely on color photography. And I’m not about to allow my kids’ sticky fingers anywhere near an electronic Harry Potter novel. But it’s hard to imagine a Kindle owner making any other kind of impulse buy at Borders.

We’re years away from e-book readers becoming as ubiquitous as iPods, so booksellers have time to find a way to ensure they don’t succumb to the same fate as CD retailers. Barnes & Noble, which is buying e-book seller Fictionwise as it gears up to launch its own downloadable book store, is obviously trying to figure this out. But it’s going to take more than in-store Starbucks concessions — and opportunities for high-brow romance — to guarantee booksellers a bricks and mortars future.

CDs and DVDs are headed for extinction and print may follow when some son-of-Kindle replaces newspapers and books, but one piece of low capacity media seems to have no expiry date: the business card. Business cards are the cockroaches of the old media world, apparently destined to survive the apocalypse. Unless you’re incredibly well organized — does anyone buy those card scanners? — your desk is probably littered with these souvenirs of new relationships.

What I want is to be able to exchange this information with the press of a button on my BlackBerry, my iPod or whatever device I happen to be carrying. The Palm products always had the ability to beam a business card to another Palm and the next upgrade to the iPhone software will reportedly do likewise, but this still limits the virtual card swapping to people with the same device. There’s a global standard for formatting the data in electronic business cards — it’s called vCard — but no hardware standard for transmitting and receiving the information.

It’s a geeky fantasy and wouldn’t go down well in Japan, where the formalities of exchanging meishi are as essential as a handshake, but surely it can’t be that hard.

Starting this blog was a costly decision. To be precise, $359. That’s how much I paid Amazon last night when I ordered a Kindle electronic book reader to kick off my plan to document the impact of digital media.

The Kindle is the missing piece in my digital life. I bought my first digital camera in 2000. I can’t remember the last time I purchase a CD. And since moving to the United States in September, I’ve largely given up DVDs in favor of videos streamed via broadband. My life is largely free of the clutter of silver discs and boxes of photos. The Kindle and devices like it promise to do the same for printed media.

But do I really want to give up books? As appealing as I find Amazon’s promise that I can carry 1,500 tomes in a device as thin as a magazine, is a house without shelves of wrinkled book spines really a home? And how can I share sections of the Sunday New York Times with my wife when I swap our print subscription for the Kindle version?

In the coming year, I’ll be exploring the cultural and business implications of the accelerating shift towards digital media. The forces that are reshaping the music industry and newspaper publishers are rippling to television and beyond. New social trends and corporate champions will emerge, just as Apple and the iPod changed the way we consume music. Names such as Roku and Boxee are challenging the relevance of the Blu-Ray DVD players that the big electronics makers want us to buy. Many of these trends are well underway in the United States and I’ll chart them through my personal experiences with the Kindle and other gadgets. With the help of my colleagues around the world and, I hope, our readers, I’ll also look at how they are taking root elsewhere. Your digital comments are welcome.