Touch iPod

... which is not to say that I have been overcome by technolust and have lost the ability to speak coherently ... "Me went to Apple Store. Touch iPod." Rather, it is to suggest that I did go to the Apple Store but that I played with the new Touch iPod - so called because a touch screen has replaced the now-familiar iPod click wheel. According to the gentleman at the store, the Touch iPod comes in an 8GB or 16GB model and if I wanted to know more than that, they had a really good website I could visit. No, it wasn't quite that bad ... but he wasn't able to answer the one burning question I have. If you look at the Touch iPod as a next generation entertainment system, on which you can also run your calendar and contacts, and even surf the web, why is it not apparent if you can actually read books on the device as well? The text capability of the iPod has always been a huge disappointment for me - the file sizes are SO limited - and there is no automatic synchronisation as there is with music and video files (well, as long as they're the right format). Ah well, I'm not in the market for a new gadget at this point (oops, did I say gadget, I meant "tool") so I'm not sufficiently interested to look it up on the Apple site. But it would be interesting to know. And who knows ... if the Touch did have that capability, would that help push a sustainable growth in e-publishing - or would that be iPodlishing?