Books will never die, but the emergence of e-readers is a foregone conclusion, methinks.

In fact, I, ahem, blogged about this myself a few weeks ago
http://www.robmansfield.net/2009/10/20/3-reasons-why-the-kindle-will-suc...

Although i think it's newspapers and magazines on these things that will lead the way. They just need to sort out a colour screen and then these things will sell by the bucket load.

It may do for straight-up-the-book-charts stuff but otherwise they simply won't have the catalogue. Look at those seriously big tomes in the Art section : will they be available on a Kindle ? No chance. Cookbooks, in theory, but they better be resistance to dodgy kitchen
substances. Out of print books ?

And where would you buy them ? Amazon obviously, but are country houses, art galleries, Oxfam and the rest expected to invest in some of Kindle/Reader selling equipment.

That to-do with the Orwell's "1984" from the Kindles did their reputation no favours either.

Mind you, it would make my bathroom a lot tidier.

Upside and downside to this obviously, but virtually anyone could now be a published author, publishing electronically via some literary itunes like site, doing away with the need to go with a print publisher. Of course this means all proof reading and sub-editing is abandoned - along with a great deal of quality control. Maybe word of mouth, taster chapters etc could compensate. Thoughts?

They are starting to make inroads into US universities as an alternative to lugging huge text books and surely the same will happen in UK universities. Once this happens, their future is assured.

the new Dan Brown book from PDF on an iPod touch, and it was a horrible experience. I also (boom tish) didn't like doing it electronically.

Too much strain on the eyes, too much faffing to turn pages etc, and battery dying inconveniently. I think they will catch on overall, just NOT with me....

DWID(Darling Wife In-Doors) bought me Sony reader last year as she knows I like techie things related to music and would follow that I would like this.
No way does it match a hard copy book.
I have tried it as she bought it.
But no good.
The only possible plus it might have had was if I could search for text.
You know when you pick up book at page 100 after 2 weeks and all these names come at you and you spent the next while searching back to find out who they are.
But alas no.
I use laptop for manuals etc and use search facility quiet a lot.

So unless some e-Reader out there has text search facility - then it is the ink and paper for me.

I haven't read the DH article yet, but I get the impression from the OP that the gist of his piece is that e-Readers are pants.

I had already reached the same conclusion for the simple reason that they are a solution in search of a problem. Never mind how cheap or effective the technology becomes, they just don't have a reason to be successful. Except perhaps hanging on a tatty string from a nail hammered into the bog wall, so that you can conjure up anything you fancy re-reading for 5 minutes while you take a dump. Their future lies in Bathroom Furniture. I'm buying shares in Armitage Shanks.

but if the Kindle is going to rage through society like the iPod did, it's going to have to confront the fact that reading is not an essentially rational act.

...but, apart from the fact that I still buy as many "tree-based" books as I used to (I'm a sucker for out of print military history), I have a Kindle, and the two co-exist quite happily. I'll be flying back to the UK for a break in a couple of weeks, and I won't be physically carrying Beevor's D-Day tome, but I will be reading it. I may also dip into the complete set of Dickens which I have on there, or maybe some Sherlock Holmes (incidentally, most out-of-copyright work can be had for free)

It searches text perfectly happily, in fact, it'll search throughout all books in the library, should you so desire.

If I'm struggling with a definition, I can highlight it and look it up in the dictionary, or even go online to the relevant Wikipedia page.

Oh, and I can get the Times each morning. Delivered. In Portland.

I can't really take against Amazon - they've invested heavily in the system (each device has a free 3G connection, for example) and it's a neat idea - hear about a book? You could be reading it in a minute. It doesn't encroach on other publishers, in fact I suspect that electronic copies make them significantly more sums of money.

I really don't see why everyone has their back up about them, was there such a reaction against the walkman? It's a convenient content delivery system, and it's going to get even better. Don't knock it until you try it.

Eventually the hardware will become "soft". Paper - or material a lot like it - will display moving text and images, and it will be so cheap and disposable that your Guardian will move, page-turn and even sing for itself.

As light projection and lcd technology improves, all we'll need is a surface to shine the stuff onto anyway.

I reckon that in about 15 years time, one of the bugbears of The Word Massive will be e-pollution. Every time we board a train or walk past a dustbin we will be pestered by discarded, all-singing, all-dancing, all-advertising pages from free newspapers and we will yearn for the simpler, quieter days of The Kindle.

I can see both sides on this one - on the one hand I love the technology and think that it will only improve, on the other books, magazines & newspapers simply "feel better" as a physical entity.

I've tried e-readers a few times from the Palm days to ones on the iPhone. They are nice, I like having access to all those books etc etc, but I hardly ever managed to use to read a book the whole way through. Where it was wonderful was when I found myself in a waiting room etc in need of something to relieve the boredom.

I would buy a Kindle (partly from the gadget perspective) but Amazon won't sell me one - you can get one in "Wallis and Futuna" (wherever that is) or the Faroe Islands (didn't know that sheep read books) but not in the major metropolis of Singapore...... oh well.....

I really don't understand the hostility towards the idea of the e-reader nor the mouth foaming hysteria that it's going mean books disappear forever. They won't.

Have you got an ipod / similar?

Do you still have cds?

Do you still have vinyl?

It will be the same with the e-reader ONCE the technology is right. No, at present, it isn't. But it will be. And when it is, we will be in thrall to its convenience, its portability, and to the fact that we don't have to massacre quite so many trees any more, nor pulp two-thirds of the copies of the Word that get printed each month.

As part of my work, we print a magazine every other week, often more frequently, and sell it for £3. If, in future, we did it via an e-reader instead of via paper, we could sell it for £2, maybe less. Wouldn't you like to save yourself that quid? For that reason alone, it seems a good plan. And we would flog more of them.

To me the parallel with iTunes is obvious. If an artist who I have followed for some time or who really appeals to me releases a new album, I will get it on cd. Every time. If it's somebody who has less impact, I might download. In book terms, I would always want the new Irving or Murakami in hardback, same with books on history etc, but I'm perfectly happy to get The Word, 442 or some "lesser" biog / autobiog as a download. Once the technology is right.

Beyond that, we're not the generation that will make it happen, it;s those below, just as it was with mp3s. Sweeping generalisation alert, but just as kids don't need / want cds cluttering up their bedroom, same with books and magazines. They want their lives on hard drives and online, not in physical books and cds.

Yet. Whether a new electronic toy is a success or not is largely due to young(er) people (late teens/20s/30s) with a disposable income. Sure, you see people in their 40s and 50s with their iPod on the train, but how many kids do you see without an iPod? How many 40 or 50 somethings own cell phones that do much more than make phone calls?

I can't see kids splashing out $300 for a KIndle when there's a new video game or a new cell phone I'm sure they'd rather have.

Let's take newspapers first. Young people don't read newspapers. Unless the electronic reader has the ability to download your daily newspaper automatically every morning you're going to have to download your rag of choice every morning. Could you really be bothered to do it every day? More importantly, are you going to remember to do it every morning with kids running round the house while you're trying to get them ready for school and you still haven't had your toast yet? Newspapers are supposed to be cheap & disposable.

I can see more of a case for magazines, but there's still the hassle of downloading each month's issue. Will The Word make the monthly CD available to download when the magazine is available electronically? So that's two lots of downloads. It might sound petty, but how many times have you heard someone curse because it took a webpage more than 5 seconds to load?

The iPod is/was marketed as having the ability to carry thousands of songs in your pocket. How many people really need hundreds of books at their fingertips? Those that do aren't the demographic the eReader manufactures/publishers are after.

I see the eReader as ending up a niche product with niche publishers making available specialized and out-of-print titles because it'll be so much cheaper for them. Think reissue record labels of the publishing world. Maybe there'll be a place for the equivalent of a Hip-O-Select or a Bear Family?

is the way it has flushed out of bookshelves all the weirdo book fetishist that are out there. Every article I've read usually comes with a repost from someone who gets tumescence everytime a mobile library drives past! How do these people ever get to actually read a single line they seem obsessed with stroking covers, sniffing paper, breaking spines etc..

Also and for the 10446 time can I say that the idea that Kindle etc will march in and no more books will be printed is nonsense. There will be a shuffling of the market and the new technology will take it's place. If all these "libroeroticist" are so fixated on paperbacks well I'm sure some canny business will be there to meet their fetid needs. There may even be a more specialists supplier for the legion of bathroom and toilet readers that are desperate for a fix.

to the faith shown here that "it'll only take a few years before we can (insert some feature or function that is currently unavailable, but which will enable some staggering leap forward, like, er, self-rotating pages or interactive photos à la Harry Potter's family album).

The Massive seems to have a very high 'Tomorrows World' quotient. The faithfull in thrall to the boffins. Have we learnt nothing about the sustainability of all this 'progress'? Do we actually need intelligent paper? Do we heck. We just need recycled paper and somewhere peaceful to read and lose ourselves in the story.

Too many conflicting formats and e-readers (Sony, Kindle etc.,) Speaking as someone who has spent a lot of time on the viability of developing tools especially for these readers-the problem is that you can only get your content from one source. And there is no money in the publishing world for anyone to develop an easy XML based language which would work universally. We're at Betamax, V2000 and VHS level at the moment.

But will the publishers/printers bother to produce at source if they have to produce 4 different formats.

I haven't read the article referred to in the OP (where is it?) but check out this article which basically says that Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) intends the iTablet to take over publishing the way the iPod and iTunes took over music

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/11/inevitable-apple-tablet/

I thought email would never catch on, mobile phones were a gimic and that i-pods were just a fad. The thing is that even those who are not that into music have an i-pod, those who do not need to be contactable have a mobile and an email address. Want always over powers need, so I think the e-reader will take off even among those who can barely read. The step change will be when they get sub £100.

It's out there. That's where it is.

Digital paper. Cyber Ink. Internet/phone/audio/video via something that looks like sunglasses.

A recent visit to Palo Alto - tells me the future has arrived - it just hasn't been released yet.

..won't want to sit in a cafe or a bar with an E Reader. They want people to know they're wading through Iron in the Soul or the Bell Jar. And E Readers don't furnish a room.

A plastic ereader described,inevitably, as a game-changer:

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/57094,news-comment,technology,plastic-e-re...