Eric Baber's blog

A good article on electronic books and the devices available to read them. There aren't yet any dedicated readers on the UK market but the first one to arrive will be the Sony Reader, in September 2008. Some interesting quotes from the article:

"While in the US there are an increasing number of new books available online, publishers in the UK have been slow to release their books in an electronic format. "

""The younger generation have spent their formative years reading from screens. We don't really know how they are going to react," says Goss. "

(I can hazard a guess though - they won't think twice about using an e-reader, and won't miss traditional books.)

And, funnily enough I was thinking exactly the following this morning:

"It is perfectly conceivable that in the future we could have something that looks like a book, feels like a book, reads like a book and with separate paper-thin pages like a book, but which uses e-ink instead of the normal kind."

Much of what people seem to think they will miss in an e-reader is the tactile aspect of it - the turning of the page, the feeling of closing it etc. An answer to this is what is described here - an e-reader that consists of, say, 100 electronic pages which display 100 pages of a book. When you get to the end of those and the book is, say, 300 pages long, you go back to the beginning and tell the reader to start displaying from page 101 - 200, and so on.

Having said that, I would see that as being an interim device - something to please that generation which still values the page-turning feeling. For the next generation this is likely to be a quaint concept, much like turning over LPs or cassettes to play side B. Why would you want to do that if there is an easier way?