OK. Maybe that headline is a little hyperbolic. But this Slate piece makes a decent point: if the future means a world where people carry more Amazon Kindles than books with actual spyable spines, then it also means a world in which we’ll no longer be able to “know them, or judge them, or love them, or reject them, based on the books they carry.”So what will you do, Kindle generation, when you cannot tell which of the quiet boys holding the e-reader on the subway is engrossed by the latest, predictable legal thriller, and which one by a cheery, long-forgotten Laurie Colwin novel? If by some chance you do end up with the right one, what do you buy him a month later, when it is time for that first, tentative, not-too-expensive present–a gift certificate for a free download?In a statement released in response to the article, a representative of the Kindle generation replied, “We’d ask him what he’s reading.”