• The Philadelphia Cheese Steak stand at 23rd and Union, formerly Philly’s Best, is the best of its type in town. It’s had two owners over the years. Both are now homicide victims.
• A consultant from out-of-state refers to Seattle’s schools “a tale of two districts,” of the haves and the have-nots. Essentially, education for the downscale has floundered, while administrators have spent the bulk of their attention trying to keep upscale families from fleeing to private schools or the burbs.
• Port of Seattle officials promise to be more transparent in their operations in the future. Of course, that could mean the bribes and the kickbacks and the sweetheart deals could just become more overt.
• Developers want to stick up a high-rise hotel where the beautiful, if age-showing, 81-year-old Seattle Greyhound bus station is now. Damn! I love that place. It’s got so many stories within it of people parting, reuniting, etc. etc.
• There’s a computer store somewhere with a window sign proudly offering, “We Remove Vista.”
• Amazon buys Audible. Say that five times fast.

• Downtown Bellevue’s getting a bowling alley again! The last one, Belle Lanes, closed 15 years ago; Barnes & Noble’s in the elegant arc-roofed building now. In a separate deal nearby, an 11-screen cinema megaplex is being turned into offices.
• To absolutely nobody’s surprise, Amazon.com announced it’s moving its HQ to south Lake Union. The dot-com may occupy parts of as many as 11 buildings sprawling over six blocks.
• A sports blogger insists KeyArena’s not so bad a joint, as long as you’re not a greedy team owner.
• The grocery biz is more efficient than ever. That means, among other things, fewer surplus products going to food banks.

• To the surprise of absolutely nobody, Paul Allen and Amazon will get to build 160-foot-tall office buildings in South Lake Union.
• Can the Sonics be saved? Some say yes! Among them: MS head honcho Steve Ballmer. There’s a lot more dealmaking and haggling to go, though.
• What should be done with the ex-Public Safety Building block downtown, which has been a big hole in the ground for more than two years now? Some city officials (read: Mayor Nickels) would like a “civic square” project. This turns out to be, as you might have guessed, a privately-developed office/condo tower with a bit of a bricked public plaza at the base.
• Pike Place Market officials want to raise $80 million, presumably from public sources. They claim the money’s needed for essential infrastructure improvements, some of which weren’t done when the Market was “saved” in the ’70s.
• How to save Pt. Townsend’s tourist biz: How ’bout a passenger ferry direct from downtown Seattle?
• The SLUT’s first day of passenger service was interrupted for half an hour when somebody found a stray ball bearing in the track.
• Meanwhile, Lake Union businesses are already helping pay for the next phase of transportation improvements–additional bus runs on two existing Metro routes.

• The giant bowling-pin sign from Leilani Lanes will be saved and put on display, out in rural Snohomish County.
• MS Windows Vista made Cnet.co.uk’s list of the worst tech products ever. Number one on the list: The Sinclair C5, a three-wheeled electric scooter from the creator of the SInclair computer. (I think it looks rather charming myself.)
• The feds won’t demand the names of thousands of Amazon.com book customers after all.
• Mayor Nickels’s office has declared a temporary lull on harassing the homeless.
• How long will it take to get full ferry service to Pt. Townsend again? Maybe a year.
• Seattle no longer has America’s fastest-inflating home prices, losing that dubious spot to Charlotte, NC.
• Keeping one person in prison in Wash. State costs $30,000 to $50,000 a year.

…to our last update to our piece about the Amazon Kindle: That NEA study that claimed (or was interpreted by some pundits as claiming) Americans don’t read anymore? Probably not.

Danny Westneat’s rave review with reservations and my pal Paul Andrews’s more scathing piece about Amazon’s new e-book device (the latter admittedly written without having seen the machine in person) both refer to the old, tired meme of “The Book.”

This meme, which I’ve bashed before, can be divided into two arguments; both of them, I believe, are specious.

First, Andrews reiterates that chestnut argument I’ve been hearing my entire adult life, that nobody reads anymore (particularly those vidiot kids guilty of not being From The Sixties); thus, The Book, and with it all capacity for rational intelligence, has become the refuge of a small literate elite just like in pre-Renaissance days.

Second, both Andrews and Westneat trot out the notion that there’s something sacred about The Book, something that will never, can never, be equalled by any electronic device imaginable; and even if it could, hardcore “people of the book” (especially the older male ones) are, by nature, proud Luddites, who’d rather be living in some imagined pre-20th-century pastoral Eden.

Andrews cites a recent National Endowment for the Arts study claiming that “reading for pleasure” among adults has dropped bigtime since the mid-’90s. Actually, all “legacy media” have dropped bigtime in popularity, from broadcast TV/radio to newspapers and magazines to movies in theaters. The culprits: DVDs, video/computer games, them danged Interwebs, and more active leisure pursuits such as gyms.

And if book buyers really were such technophobes, Amazon wouldn’t have made its first market niche from them.

Folks “read for pleasure” on screens all the time these days. You’re probably doing so right now.

The catch is that Internet-based reading has, to date, emphasized short-form content, such as that featured in this splendiferous web-column thingy.

The trick has been to devise an environment that facilitates/encourages long-form reading; i.e. single book-length texts.

That’s what all the developers of specialized e-book reader machines have strived for this past decade or so. From what I’ve read about Kindle (I haven’t seen one in person either), they’re still not there yet.

But that doesn’t mean it’ll never happen.

I can foresee something a little bigger than the iPhone or a little smaller than a Tablet PC, running open source software or at least non-encrypted file formats, that’s pleasant enough on the eyes for extended reading times, and which enables the total immersive feel of burying oneself in a good tale.

Further updates still: According to the SeaTimes’s Brier Dudley, Amazon didn’t develop the Kindle hardware here but in Silicon Valley. And Amazon indeed ignored the Seattle media at Kindle’s launch, not even inviting anybody from here to its big debut presentation in NYC.

Here’s some more info about the Amazon Kindle e-book reader from my own e-book publishers.

Apparently, I was wrong about a couple of points: Kindle does play MP3 audio files and includes a rudimentary Web browser.

Amazon.com’s first in-house hardware product, the “Kindle” e-book device, isn’t to be officially announced until tomorrow (Monday).

But already, pundits and bloggers are placing virtual bets on the machine’s commercial viability.

Some, including Newsweek’s Steven Levy in a long puff piece, are calling it the future of reading, or at least a stepping stone toward the future of reading.

Others, such as Information Week’s Thomas Claburn, have already proclaimed Kindle a “debacle.” These skeptics note that specialized e-book reading devices have been out in one form or another, from one company or another, for almost a decade now, and nobody’s made turned them into must-have lifestyle accessories.

My take, without having seen the thing (and, as something sold only online, how’s anybody going to see it before buying it?): It’s a $399 tablet that pretty much just plays back texts and limited graphics, in a copy-protected file format. It does have Wi-Fi built in plus a little keyboard, so it can be used for email and for the digital editions of daily newspapers (by paid subscription, natch). But it probably won’t be capable of games or audio-video files or serious computing applications.

For the same price you can get the highly successful iPhone, which has Wi-Fi, displays texts, provides the free online versions of every newspaper that offers one, plays music and movies, runs (or soon will run) third-party Web-based applications, and also makes and receives phone calls.

Or if you want a larger text surface to peruse, there are tablet PCs and laptops.

And while proprietary e-book reader formats have come and gone, e-books themselves have become a real business.

I have the great fortune of contributing to a strong, growing e-book publisher. (Buy my e-book title now and get the next update free!)

This outfit, Take Control Books, uses Adobe’s darn-near-ubiquitous .PDF format. (Yes, I know the phrase “.PDF format” expands into “Portable Document Format format.”) It’s an open standard. It lets you read text at a size big enough for eyes my age or small enough for a small-screened device. (So far, refitting .PDFs for iPhone’s more intimate confines takes some ingenuity, but people are working on that.)

Yes, on-screen reading of long-form text documents (i.e., “books”) is here, and here to stay, no matter what’s Kindle’s market fate.

…from some other burg? Lonesome for Seattle’s most vibrant streetscape? Thanks to Amazon.com’s A9 site, you can now take a virtual trip up Aurora Avenue!

…buy almost anything that’s legal from Amazon these days.