Rumor has it that the will be introduced at an Amazon event in New York on Monday. Last fall, images purported to be the Kindle 2 surfaced on .

The first-generation Kindle cost US$359--when you could buy it. "The Kindle has spurred much interest in the e-book category, not only because of its wireless capabilities, but also because it extends the footprint of Amazon nearly anywhere," notes Ross Rubin, NPD Group director of industry analysis. "It's been one of the first wirelessly connected consumer electronics products to offer fast connectivity at no end-user cost to the consumer."

That connectivity--an integrated 3G cellular radio and Kindle's free, Whispernet EvDO wireless connection provided in partnership with Sprint--allows immediate access to the Kindle store for on-demand e-book purchases. Plus, you can use Whispernet to subscribe to and receive blogs and RSS feeds, as well as to browse basic Web sites (text pages, not graphics-heavy sites, so it's handy for quick news and weather checks, or for Wikipedia lookups).

A second-generation Kindle has the opportunity to correct some of the design flaws of the first-gen model--it was too bulky, and handled PDFs and other document files less than gracefully--while making the device more competitive and appealing, given new competition.

Sony, for example, has added backlighting and a touch screen, on its slim second-generation . Meanwhile, Google announced that the 1.5 million public-domain books in its will be accessible via mobile handsets such as the and the . And Amazon has countered by saying that it is working on making Kindle e-book titles accessible on cell phones as well.