Amazon’s new $199 “Kindle Fire” may surpass the phenomenal sales of Apple’s iPad.

In the first five days it has been available for pre-order, 250,000 were sold. Apple sold 300,000 iPads on opening day, but that included pre-orders and live sales. If Amazon continues like this, the Fire will probably burn past the iPad.

Should you get one? Unlike the iPad 2, the Fire doesn’t have a microphone or camera, but its simplified interface makes it easy to switch from movies to games to books to photos. And no matter how many downloads you have, Amazon will store them for free if they originally came from Amazon. They have 18 million items: movies, TV shows, songs, magazines and books. Ten thousand movies can be downloaded for free if you pay $79 a year for a “prime” membership; which also gives you free two-day shipping on other Amazon orders. We took the deal because of the free shipping.

By the way: We recently saw a comparative price chart in the October 1, 2011 issue of the Economist magazine and Amazon’s prices were lower than Walmart and almost all other large retailers. The exceptions were Costco and Dollar General. Interesting stuff.

A storehouse of three million free titles from the Google digital library may tempt us to get the new iRiver EBook reader. Target is selling it for $140.

The reader is called “Story HD” and it looks very much like the Amazon Kindle. The HD designation means High Definition, and the screen images are considerably sharper than other e-readers. Besides the free titles, there are about 150,000 paid ones.  Bob likes it that the page turning buttons are not on the side, where he’s likely to push them accidently just picking it up.

The Story HD is the same price as Barnes and Noble’s “Nook” e-reader as wells as the ad-free version of Amazon’s “Kindle.” You can view MS Word documents just as they are, and bring in PDF files that are actually readable. The Amazon Kindle makes them too tiny. A short-coming is you have to be in range of a WiFi signal to download a new book, newspaper, magazine or blog. The Kindle’s $189 version comes with free 3G service, the wireless service used by cell phones, which lets us download a new item from almost anywhere, even riding by on a train.

Here’s how bad an Internet addiction can get. CBS science correspondent Daniel Sieberg was assigned to do a show on swimming with sharks in the Bahamas and as his boat approached them, he sent Facebook alerts with one hand while steadying the boat with the other, then panicked when his Blackberry showed a signal strength of only two bars. When the signal cut out completely, his heart started pounding. He knew he had to keep breathing or could get lung damage, but he had a sudden urge to use his Blackberry underwater.

Instead he wrote a book, “The Digital Diet: The 4-step plan to break your tech addiction and regain balance in your life,” $13 from ThreeRiversPress.com. It has exercises to help you break free and checklists to evaluate how bad your addiction is.

Bob thinks none of this is necessary. There are so many positive benefits to tech; and to be fair, the book also mentions those. There’s the 92 year-old woman who stayed in touch with her granddaughter even from her hospital bed.

And the widely publicized fear of too much time with video games is also way overdone. There are benefits. We just read a University of Medicine & Dentistry report that found playing video games sped recovery from the after-effects of strokes. There are also studies that show playing video games improves children’s analytical and mathematical skills. And then of course, it should help if you want to learn how to operate drones.

A recent press release drew a lot of attention from some people when it claimed a new cartridge let old cameras take digital pictures. You just put the cartridge into the compartment where you would normally put a roll of film, the release claimed, and the camera would be able to take digital pictures.

A number of high-tech blogging sites as well as Popular Science magazine went into a tizzy over this device, labeled the “RE-35” and wrote it up as a major breakthrough. Unfortunately for them, it was an April Fool’s joke. We went to RE35.net to find out more. Turns out a German design company, Rogge & Pott, created the RE35 as an exercise. The designers say the huge response they got shows there’s a lot of interest. With demand like this, they are “looking into the possibilities” of actually building it. (Don’t hold your breath on this.)

This is still in the trial stage, what the programmers call “alpha.” Speaking to The Times of London, Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services, said:”We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a couple years.” You can view a trial conversational exchange at thinyurl.com/universaltranslate. Not perfect, but on its way.

Some experts argue that universal translation is unlikely to come about in the next few years because people have so many different accents. But the phone will learn your style the more you use it.

Shapiro is CEO of CEA which owns CES. In case you didn’t follow that, CEA is the Consumer Electronics Association which every year puts on CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas.

“The Comeback” is Shapiro’s blueprint for the road ahead. Much of it is familiar, such as cutting government spending.  It’s the details that are interesting, and the history lessons.

Example: In the 1980s, Bell Laboratory researchers developed high-speed “DSL” connections. This was well before the invention of the Web or AOL’s dial-up service. The phone companies saw DSL as serious competition. It took the breakup of the phone monopoly in 1996 to get high-speed Internet connections going. But things didn’t get good overnight. The U.S. ranks 15th in the percentage of households with broadband Interent connections, according to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, and our average connection speeds are only one-half to one-third as fast as Hong Kong’s and South Korea’s.

“The Comeback,” published by Beaufort Books, is available for $15 from Amazon.com.

The Kobo’s battery life is great: You can turn and churn through 10,000 pages before needing a recharge. It has the easy-on-your eyes “e-ink” technology, unlike the new Barnes and Noble Nook. Add a four gigabyte memory card to store 400 more books past the initial 100. You can also check out library books in the “epub” or PDF format. Read all about it (as they used to say) at Kobo.com.

The only major downside we saw was the absence of a physical keyboard. We prefer the Kindle’s tiny buttons for each letter of the alphabet; this makes it easier to search for new titles. But you can always use your computer to search and then transfer them by cable.

You don’t have to buy the Kobo reader to use its free software. There’s a Kobo app for reading ebooks on a computer, smartphone or tablet. Five free classics are included with the app. The Kobo app for iPad or iPhone syncs with the “Instapaper” app to let you start reading an article online and finish it offline as a virtual Kobo book. The Kobo app also includes “My Reading Life,” an app that makes it easy to share book passages on Facebook, win badges for reading, keep track of how much you’ve read and so on.

Now you can give a Kindle book to someone who doesn’t have a Kindle e-reader. Kindle books can be read on the iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone, Mac, PC, Blackberry and Android phone.There are over 750,000 digital books available at Amazon.

We’re more likely to use the new gift service, however, for friends who do have Kindles. Before, if you wanted to give a fellow Kindle owner a digital book, you’d be stuck with sending a gift certificate. Now you can click on a Kindle edition and select “Give as a Gift.” Notifications of Kindle book gifts are delivered instantly by e-mail. For more information, go to www.amazon.com/givekindlebooks.