The future of electronic publishing — at least in its latest iteration — was unveiled Monday in New York City by Amazon, unveiling the Kindle 2 book reader. And, quite separately, what may be the future of the electronic newspaper was also announced in New York by Amazon rival Plastic Logic, though with a lot less fanfare.

What’s the difference? Well, the Kindle 2 is thinner, sleeker, crisper in display, holds more books, and has some interesting bells and whistles — a joystick controller and it talks — that Kindle 1 didn’t have. Perhaps most important, Amazon plans to begin shipping Kindle2 later this month, still at the Kindle 1 price of $359.

But what Kindle 2 lacks — and Plastic Logic’s still-unnamed e-reader has — is a screen big enough to configure ads that resemble a print newspaper. Plastic Logic’s reader screen is 2.5 times the size of Kindle 2, big enough, the Mountainview, California-based startup says, to allow newspapers to format traditional-looking print ads on a wireless screen if they go to an e-paper delivery system. Plastic Logic is also talking with quite a few other media partners, according to a report in The New York Times.

It is probably no accident that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos spent a lot of time talking about how Kindle 2 will grab the book market, but didn’t say much about his device as the new e-paper. And it is certainly no accident that among the partners Plastic Logic announced for its new e-reader were two major-league newspapers — the Financial Times and USA Today. Plastic Logic says its e-reader will be “competitive” in price, but won’t be available until next year.

Missing from Plastic Logic’s partners’ list was Hearst, which says it is still mulling whether to start producing an all-electronic Seattle Post-Intelligencer when it kills the print P-I next month. A Hearst spokesman declined to discuss the company’s plans with Crosscut, but Hearst has been working on its own e-paper prototype in Palo Alto, Cal., under the name FirstPaper.

Seattle Times Executive editor David Boardman added another intriguing tidbit to this stew at a forum Feb. 1 at the Plymouth Church in Seattle. Boardman, whose paper is struggling financially, mentioned his interest in the new e-reader technology, according to a Crosscut colleague at the forum. Boardman added, as a personal interest not necessarily his paper's, two other ideas for a future configuration of The Times: dropping its daily print paper in favor of a web edition, publishing in print only on Sunday, when 50 percent of the print advertising is realized; or, as an alternative, offering readers the choice of a mass-market Web paper and a more costly, but limited, print edition.