It’s true of other portable electronics and it applies here, too: if you own an e-reader, there’s a strong argument to be made that you need a case. Sure, readers are a little more scratch-resistant than smartphones, but a little bit of backpack trauma can do some nasty things to an e-ink display. That could be Amazon’s elevator pitch, anyway. Introduced at the company’s launch event last week, the Kindle Lighted Leather Cover comes in various sizes, with versions for the Kindle Touch and fourth generation Kindle. We spent some hands-on time with the latter over the weekend and have to say: we’re liking what we’re seeing so far. Read on to find out why.

One of the three major devices launched at today’s Amazon event, the Kindle Touch is aimed firmly at the latest touchscreen Nook and Kobo devices. Like those readers, the new Kindle is based around an infrared touchscreen, in the place of a physical keyboard, making the device a good deal smaller than the Kindle 3. The touchscreen is fairly responsive, and the thing flips through pages quickly with a swipe or a tap, refreshing about once every six pages or so, a rate about on-par with that of its chief competition. A task like performing a search on the other hand, requires a much larger screen refresh — still, activities like these and typing are performed quite quickly for an E-Ink device. The search function itself is rather precise, letting the user locate instances of things like character names throughout a text. In all, it looks as though Amazon has produced a worthy competitor to the space-leading touch devices — and the $99 / $149 price tags for the WiFi and 3G versions certainly don’t hurt. Check out a video of the device after the break.