THE SKINNY: You've seen it. You've heard about it. You've read the spec sheet again and again. Kindle 2.0 was unveiled on Monday in New York by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who turned up alongside author Stephen King for the big announcement.

SPECS: Kindle 2 weighs in at 10.2 ounces, downloads books in less than a minute and sports a 25 percent longer battery life than the original Kindle. It allows users to peek at newspapers from around the world, download up to 230,000 books and also access blogs and 22 magazine titles. Storage is greater than the earlier Kindle, with 2 GB overall (enough for 1,500 books) and 1.4 GB available for user content. Display-wise, Kindle 2 offers 16 shades of grayscale and has a "Read-to-Me" function that offers text-to-speech. Pages turn at a 20 percent faster rate than in the original Kindle.