While books have been available in electronic form for some time, their Achilles heel, it seems to me, has always been the devices used to read them. The limitations of display technology, battery life, form factor or cost have meant that they’ve never been a viable alternative to a traditional book for me.
It’s possible, though, that we may now be seeing the start of a change; driven primarily by a change in the display technology. With the advent of a new technology, electrophoretic displays, we’re starting to see the first devices using it appear on the market. There’s the Sony Reader and now Amazon’s Kindle. Newsweek has a terrific article on the Kindle, which is well worth reading. What makes the Kindle interesting is that it is not merely the endpoint in an Amazon service, but it is an endpoint that potentially can be two-way (annotations can be fed back to be incoprorated into alternate versions of the books). This may be the impetus to change the market. This is unlikely to happen significantly fast, but as Microsoft’s Bill Hill (he who coined the phrase that Homo sapien’s operating system is still at release 1.0) points out:
…the energy-wasting, resource-draining process of how we make books now. We chop down trees, transport them to plants, mash them into pulp, move the pulp to another factory to press into sheets, ship the sheets to a plant to put dirty marks on them, then cut the sheets and bind them and ship the thing around the world. Do you really believe that we’ll be doing that in 50 years?
Geoff Coupe's Blog 
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