It seems that one of the questions I got asked most frequently in 2009 – at weddings, in email, in the church narthex, at Northwestern – was some version of “Should I get a Kindle?”  Even people who aren’t sure assume that I have one (and indeed, thanks to the generosity of friends, I have a couple).

The most recent version of the query came from Tribune literary editor Liz Taylor, who wondered if I could write a piece for the Printers Row pages of the Saturday Tribune on “why you use it, and maybe some tips . . . but as a WORD person, who loves books no matter what the form.” Well, sure. You can see the result, from the Dec. 26 edition, here.

Meanwhile, it seems that there were nearly as many articles on e-readers published this Christmas season as there were books to consume on them.  Christmas morning, for instance, the Trib business section reported on shortages and / or delayed launches of several Kindle competitors; on Christmas Eve morning the NYT’s “Bits” blog used an interview with Jeff Bezos and some data mining of customer comments to lay out a reason why all those competitors were rushing to get into the market.  It’s getting to the point that covering e-readers is like covering presidential politics: lots of focus on the horse race, very little on either the technology or the use case.

Which is why I probably enjoyed the Economist’s Dec. 12th piece, “Read all about it,” more than most.  It’s mostly about the display technology behind the readers; as the piece’s pullout summary puts it, “Readers of electronic books must choose between long battery life or vibrant, living colour. Could they have both?”  This is the place to go if you want to read about choleristic LCD’s and electophoretic displays, among other contenders to provide an answer to that question . . . while responsibly pointing out that “in the history of ingenious display technologies, only a handful have ever made it into mass production.”

Which brings us to the mass production that many ink-stained and pixel-strained wretches seem to be waiting for: The Tablet.  Since 2009 appears to have been The Year of the E-Reader, with sales tripling from 1 million to 3 million according to Forrester, 2010 is shaping up to be The Year of the Tablet, at least according to the NYT blog item of the same name to which I link here.  (A lot of this coverage currently is also of the horse-race variety, even though we don’t officially know the names or saddle-blanket colors of the entrants. I would guess the number of articles about Apple’s presumed tablet launch has more than tripled, if from a lower base.)

So should you buy a Kindle now, or a Nook when Barnes & Noble gets them back into stock, or a Sony Reader the next time you’re in the mall? Should you just use your smartphone? Should you just stay focused on acid-free paper?

Or should you be like a certain addled Northwestern professor and buy some of your books in both analog and digital form, one for comfort and one for speed?

Which makes it as good a time as any to note Julia Keller’s orders to us in the Tribune this morning, two pages in back of my  minimum opus: “So forget Kindle.” Fine. I think I’ll go unwrap those things under the Christmas tree that look like books.