SARA NELSON, the former editor of Publishers Weekly, was at a dinner party recently when Ed Rollins, the Republican campaign consultant, arrived carrying a Kindle.

“And I just said, ‘Can I see it?’ ” said Ms. Nelson, also the author of “So Many Books, So Little Time.” “In this honeymoon period of Kindle  when a lot of people don’t have them  you can look to see what someone is reading, in the guise of looking at the hardware.” (For the record, Mr. Rollins’s Kindle was crammed with the day’s newspapers.)

Ms. Nelson owns a Kindle and a Sony Reader. And for her, the ownership of an electronic book reader, while not necessarily a badge of literary honor, at least telegraphs a commitment to books.

“It’s really expensive,” she said of the Kindle 2, which Amazon sells for $359. “If you’re going to pay that, you’re giving a statement to the world that you like to read  and you’re probably not using it to read a mass market paperback.”