[Prestidigitweeze]

One of the things I love about using Sony readers with official lighted covers is the effect they create of silent movie captions projected in relative darkness.

Intertitles in the silent age were lit from the front while being filmed. The results were then translated into flickering light projected, again, from the front onto a lenticular screen of silk embedded with silver or aluminum (hence "silver screen") -- all of which gives the viewer the sense of a ghostly emanation.

With LED-lighted covers, something about the darkening borders of that pale projected light and its direction lend a similar effect, awakening nostalgia for a time long before we were born and evoking the elegance of earlier days.

Most other light systems I've tried have been too bulky to provide that sort of seamless luminescence (though the Solis with the Kindle 3 comes very close), but I wonder whether the Glow's light creates a similar effect.

It's a great effect whether you're reading Baudelaire or George Eliot, and it's conducive to horror stories, with their reliance on the attachment of childhood fears to early memories and objects that seem to exist outside of present time.

Those who complain about e-ink screens' dull background compared to paper's might especially enjoy those official lighted covers. If the contrast is similar, they might even come to prefer the internal glowlight.