Rumors of a next-generation Kindle, Amazon's e-book reader, started appearing on the Internet almost as soon as the initial version hit the market. Now, it appears that the company is finally ready to show the world what it's had up its sleeve. The company invited the press to an event it will host on February 9th at a location--the Morgan Library and Museum--that suggests it may have books on its mind.

There are a number of reasons that the Kindle's rumor mill seems to been able to produce a steady stream of material for such an extended period of time. For one, the device has frequently wound up selling out of stock, which suggests that Amazon was tightly managing its supply chain so as not to wind up with an abundance of discontinued hardware in its warehouses. The poor timing of some of these out-of-stock events, such as the one that included the entire holiday sales season, made this logic seem that much more credible.

Then there was the device itself. Despite handling its book reading function with aplomb, the device suffered from a series of hardware quirks, and the software that handled non-book content left a few things to be desired. And the device's aesthetics, or lack thereof, left a lot of people hungering for something less, well, ugly. Or at least something more akin to its primary competition, Sony's Reader, which has seen an update in recent months.

Since we first took a look at the Kindle 2.0 rumors over eight months ago, a rough consensus seems to have emerged. The next version of the device will have fewer sharp edges, but won't see two of its major features--the white coloring and a keyboard that takes up a big fraction of the hardware's user-facing surface--revised in any way. E-Ink, which manufactures the device's display, says they've had more advanced versions ready for a while now, so some sort of upgrade there seems inevitable.

Despite the quirks, the Kindle keeps selling out, and prominent Chicagoans such as Oprah Winfrey and our own Ken Fisher seem to love it. So, it's safe to assume that the 2.0 version will make a big splash in the e-book world.

We're definitely attending the press conference, so you can expect to see a full report. We've had a rocky history when it comes to e-book reader hardware--a Manhattan bike messenger was needed to give us access to Kindle 1.0, and Sony never followed through on their promise to give us a Reader 2.0 to review--but we'll do the best we can to get you a full hands-on.