Sophie Wilkinson
C&EN Washington

They've been a long time coming, but e-books--books in electronic form that can be read on a computer or a handheld device--are finally making their presence felt in the marketplace. Market penetration has been hampered by high prices, unwieldy or unsophisticated hardware and software, limited title offerings, and consumers who were unaware of the product or thought they wouldn't like it. But designers, marketers, and readers alike are waking up to the potential of e-books--also known as eBooks--and these products are making forays into the territory traditionally monopolized by the printed page.

The world of e-books is complex and undisciplined. It's a business in flux. Companies are plagued by the e-book equivalent of "vapor-ware," with announced launch dates for new reading devices and services bumped repeatedly, sometimes by years. Some products are pulled from the market almost as soon as they hit store shelves.

E-books can be viewed on computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), or dedicated e-book reading devices. Software to view the books may come bundled with the hardware or may need to be downloaded from the Internet. The e-books themselves can be obtained from authors, publishers, printing companies, digital libraries, and virtual bookstores. And these different sources may proffer the e-books in any one--or more--of a range of digital formats.

Part of the chaos arises from a lack of standards in the business. Some broad trends are emerging, however. The devices or software used to read e-books are often equipped with an electronic dictionary and some free books. Readers can work their way through an e-book by turning from page to page, rather than having to scroll through the text. They can call up a dialogue box on-screen for further options. These might include jumping to a selected page of a document, inserting a digital bookmark, searching for keywords within a single book or across an entire collection, highlighting text of particular interest, or jotting down notes on-screen and "attaching" them to the text.

Some reading devices feature a backlight that illuminates the screen for reading in dim light. The orientation of the display may be changed by rotating the screen contents 90 at a time, useful for lefties or for viewing landscape-oriented material. Usable screen size ranges from about 2.5 by 3 inches to about 6 by 8 inches, depending on the product. Rechargeable batteries last anywhere from two to 40 hours, again depending on the device.

The current crop of e-books and reading devices is considerably more user-friendly than the earlier clunky models. But sales remain slow, in part because many people still don't know about these products. Recent high-profile activity has helped to bring them to the attention of the public, however. In March, Simon & Schuster published Stephen King's ghost story, "Riding the Bullet," exclusively as an e-book. The 66-page electronic novella was formatted for e-book reading devices, PDAs, and personal computers, and customers downloaded it more than half a million times, in many cases for free.

The industry has faith that the market really will take off, and soon. Microsoft has posted a prediction on its website that sales of digital books, magazines, and newspapers will top $1 billion by 2005, and that e-book titles will outsell paper in many categories by the end of this decade. By 2020, nearly all titles will be available in digital format, the firm predicts. And it anticipates that the primary definition of the word "book" in dictionaries will refer to e-books read on-screen.

King's e-only novella raised consumer awareness of e-books.

Of course, e-books suit certain consumers better than others. E-books are likely to "be more popular with the younger generation that is more comfortable with using computers and having information online," according to Tim Ingoldsby, director of business development at the American Institute of Physics , Melville, N.Y. "All of us old fogeys are eventually going to retire, and at some point maybe all the people who are dependent on print will no longer be in the profession. So some day, it will be the way."

For now, publishers and book sellers are concentrating on mass-market consumer and reference books, of which thousands are available for sale in digital format. And many sites on the Internet give readers access to piles of free public-domain e-books. Digitized versions of popular magazines and newspapers like Newsweek and the New York Times are also being marketed.

Promising candidates

Some classic scientific texts and a few new science books are out there, and more are coming. Ingoldsby believes science books in an electronic format will become "widespread but probably not dominant" within five years. The science books most likely to shift into the electronic realm include handbooks and other encyclopedia-type books that lend themselves to searching and other actions that are easier in the electronic arena than in print, Ingoldsby says.

A few are already available on CD-ROM or on the Web. For instance, " Ullmann's Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry ," published by Wiley-VCH, has been available on CD-ROM since 1997, and it went online for the first time this May. These electronic formats permit a considerable space savings compared with the 37-volume print edition. Updates are provided annually for the CD-ROM and on a quarterly basis for the online edition.

Elsevier Science's new " Encyclopedia of Materials: Science & Technology " will be published both online and in an 11-volume print edition in September 2001. The online version will feature hyperlinked indexes, cross references, and bibliographic links to abstracts and full texts where available, according to Patrick S. Jackson, publishing director for chemistry and chemical engineering in Amsterdam. The e-version will be fully searchable.

Jackson expects print and digital versions of reference works such as the encyclopedia to continue to coexist for the short term. But "the electronic versions will gradually become more dominant and offer an increasing array of features not currently seen in print," he says. They'll also offer "more flexibility with updating--which is often a headache with multivolume reference works."

Digital publication also provides "a practical solution to the problem of bulky proceedings volumes, which often have a limited life cycle," Jackson adds. Elsevier currently publishes the proceedings of meetings in both print and electronic form. The company will soon publish "Proceedings of the 12th International Drying Symposium" on CD-ROM only. "We have done several proceedings on CD-ROM in the past, but there has always been an equivalent book of proceedings to accompany it," he says. "The fact that this time there is no printed version at all perhaps signifies a change in acceptance of the digital medium as the main carrier."

Elsevier also markets products such as the Active Library on Corrosion 2.0 project. This CD-ROM contains a collection of corrosion-related hyperlinked books, journals, databases, and original documents.

In addition to references, another likely source of demand for electronic science books is the university textbook market, says Michael Hannant, electronic journals publisher at the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) in Cambridge, England.

RSC itself hasn't yet decided whether it will move into e-books. Currently, the society offers some of its print books in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) versions on the Web, though Hannant doesn't really consider them to be e-books. "These are very much look-alikes of the print versions," he says. He regards electronic access as simply another method of distribution that allows customers to buy individual book chapters. For instance, a reader can download a 39-page chapter on methane oxidation from the book "Catalysis" for about $60.

In the short term, the American Chemical Society has plans to offer only one of its book titles electronically: " Reagent Chemicals , 9th Edition." Publications Division Director Robert D. Bovenschulte says the online version of this handbook will resemble a database and will have the advantage that ACS can update the contents easily as information changes.

Bovenschulte imagines that the society will be distributing full-fledged e-books within three years. ACS is "very interested in the future of electronic books, and not just for our books program," he adds. "One could imagine journals being downloaded--or collections of articles that would be organized thematically--through the same mechanism that delivers electronic books."

Harcourt has already made several forays into the digital market. The company recently began packaging educational content on digital versatile discs (DVDs) that can be read on Sony's portable DVD player. Despite some limitations of the technology, "the positive side is that all of the texts for a four-year college course can be placed on a single DVD," says Pieter S. H. Bolman, president of the firm's scientific publishing division, Academic Press (AP) .

AP itself has put all of its book titles from 1999 onward in digital format, says Bolman, who is based in San Diego. Some titles are available on CD-ROM, and a small but increasing number are accessible online through a Web browser, especially reference works. The online version of the three-volume "Encyclopedia of Spectroscopy & Spectrometry" will soon be available, for instance. Digital texts are currently formatted in PDF, and, starting next year, will also be provided in XML--one of the languages, along with HTML, used to create, display, and exchange documents on the Web. Additionally, AP plans to provide content intended for electronic readers "as soon as the technology allows acceptable display of the content."

Not quite ready

Scientific content puts special demands on displays, and publishers seem to agree that handheld devices and computers aren't yet up to the task. Some consumers believe that the displays aren't even good enough for reading nontechnical e-books.

One strike against e-book reading devices is that the resolution of on-screen displays tends to be significantly lower than a printed page. In addition, Bolman says, "the state of screen technology has limited the use of these products for content containing halftones, color, or fine-line art, since reader screens have only been about as good as Palm Pilot screens. However, recent software display advances such as [Microsoft's] ClearType and the imminent availability of higher resolution screen technology may provide book-quality readability. Once this occurs, we expect that there will be significant demand for electronic books."

Casio's PDA (left) displays e-books using Microsoft Reader software; Microsoft's interface allows users to highlight and mark up e-book text.

Another e-book drawback, Ingoldsby says, is that "there is no real standard way of displaying equations and intense tabular material" like those found in scientific documents. In fact, lack of standards isn't a problem just for science-related content. Digital pandemonium is endemic to the entire e-book industry, which hasn't yet adopted a single standard format for electronic documents.

Some factions are pressing to bring order out of chaos, however. The Open eBook Forum (OEBF) --a group that includes hardware and software companies, publishers and users of e-books, and related organizations, including the National Institute of Standards & Technology--is working on standardization issues for creation and distribution of e-books. OEBF wants to encourage wide adoption of common specifications so e-books downloaded from any supplier can be viewed on any type of reading device. The forum has already developed the Open eBook Publication Structure, a standard representation for the content of electronic books. It is based on HTML and XML.

The forum is also addressing publishers' concerns about e-book piracy, in which unethical book buyers circulate free copies to readers, cutting into publishers' sales. A similar problem afflicts the music industry. Napster , the Internet service vilified by album distributors and artists but adored by music lovers, is used by consumers to exchange digitized music files for free. Napster was recently sued by the recording industry and record companies for copyright infringement, and those in the e-book business will undoubtedly pay close attention to the outcome of the court case.

Companies that sell readers and e-books have seen the writing on the wall and are developing ways to protect their content from similar free trading. For instance, e-documents can be encoded so consumers can't print them out. Or purchased titles can be encrypted for a specific purchaser's reading device. Those titles can be forwarded but can't be viewed on a different person's device unless they pay for their own copy--which they may be able to do by jumping through a link to the content provider's website.

Given that publishers are leery of digital lawlessness and readers aren't clamoring for e-books, it may seem surprising that the market is heating up at all. But e-books have some attractive and unique features.

One of the biggest advantages is the ability to carry the content of a dozen or even hundreds of books in a device that's roughly the size of an average paperback. That can be a big benefit when traveling. And reading material isn't limited to the texts the traveler starts off with: New volumes can be downloaded via a computer hook-up or in some cases right over a telephone line via a built-in modem.

That rapid, virtual delivery eliminates the time delays and costs associated with shipping printed books. "You can get your hands on information just about as quickly as it's made available," Ingoldsby says. In addition, content can be updated and out-of-print titles can be resurrected at minimal cost compared with print.

The technology has many other advantages, according to e-book distributor 1stBooks Library of Bloomington, Ind. An e-book can be made available worldwide with minimal expense to its publisher; the supply of any particular title is unlimited, but there are no unsold copies left over; if an e-book is lost or damaged, it is easily replaced; storage space is minimal; and people with vision problems can easily enlarge type, the company says.

E-books aren't encumbered with the page limits forced on printed books, Hannant observes. That means a lot more can be stuffed into them, such as an interactive testing section at the end of each chapter--a feature that would be useful in digital textbooks.

Additionally, Bolman notes, "they can present content that cannot be reproduced in print, including streaming video, sound, and three-dimensional rendering."

Finally, e-books can be considerably cheaper than their paper counterparts, at least in theory, Bovenschulte says. "If a publisher is not printing and binding and distributing books and taking returns and chopping up those returns, there could be some very significant savings," he believes.

The selection

Just a few dedicated reading devices are on the market. They include the Rocket eBook, produced by NuvoMedia of Mountain View, Calif., and the SoftBook Reader, made by SoftBook Press of Redwood City, Calif.

The $199, 22-oz Rocket eBook Classic can hold the equivalent of about 10 novels, and the $269 Rocket eBook Pro model can hold about 40 books. RocketEdition books and periodicals are purchased and downloaded via a Web browser onto a PC or Macintosh from online booksellers. Titles can then be transferred into the reader through a "cradle" attached to the computer. The Rocket eBook, which can also handle personal documents and Web pages, is compatible with documents in HTML, Microsoft Word, or ASCII text file formats. The Rocket eBook features a black-and-white display and audio capabilities and is about the size of a paperback novel.

The leather-bound SoftBook Reader sells for $599.95, or $299.95 with an agreement to purchase content for 24 months at $19.95 per month. Approximately the size of a three-ring binder and weighing almost 3 lb, it can hold as many as 250 books on a removable CompactFlash storage card. Books and periodicals can be downloaded from the firm's website. The reading material is imported over an Ethernet connection or a standard phone line (via a built-in modem) at a rate of about 100 pages per minute. SoftBook e-books cost 50 to 75% less than the suggested retail price for hard-cover editions and are stored for the customer on an "online bookshelf." The reader has a black-and-white display.

	SoftBook's Reader is the largest dedicated e-book device.

SoftBook suggests that its reader may be just the ticket for conveniently carrying business documents that are typically stashed in three-ring binders or on PCs, such as training materials, technical manuals, and financial reports. Content can be updated automatically via a phone line or network--a more reliable process than having an intern update hard-copy manuals when there's a spare hour. Drivers for a distribution company can download route information at the start of each workday, or workers in the pharmaceutical industry can obtain updated policies and procedures as soon as they go into effect.

Both NuvoMedia and SoftBook Press were recently purchased by Gemstar-TV Guide International, which is phasing out the Rocket eBook and SoftBook devices. Gemstar has licensed its e-book technology to Thomson Multimedia, which is due to begin selling two e-book readers under the RCA brand name in October. The REB1100, weighing in at just over 1 lb, will have capacity for about 20 books and display them on a black-and-white touch-sensitive screen. The 2-lb REB1200 will hold fewer books--about a dozen--but will display them in color. Additional memory will be available for both devices.

Other devices that have been announced include the eBookman line from Franklin Electronic Publishers . The Burlington, N.J., company says its readers will come on the market in late fall at prices ranging from about $130 to $230. A rechargeable battery will cost an estimated $20 to $30 more. They'll hold about 10 to 30 books. The black-and-white display screens will be larger than those on a typical PDA, Franklin adds.

Everybook Inc. of Harrisburg, Pa., is developing the folding, two-panel EB Journal, which will weigh about 5 lb. Its launch has been delayed several times but is now scheduled for mid-2001. If the EB Journal makes it to market, users will be able to display two different books on its two screens, or read a book on one panel and carry out a different task--such as making handwritten notes--on the other. The three-ring-binder-sized EB Journal will hold about 1,000 books on removable storage cards and display them in color on touch-sensitive screens. E-books will be available at 20 to 40% off publisher's list price on the Everybook website and will be able to be downloaded over a phone line via a built-in modem.

Everybook will initially focus on professional reference e-books in fields such as pharmaceuticals and engineering. The company is also targeting customers' internal document applications, such as service and training manuals, component catalogs, and industrial references. Documents must be PDF files.

The EB Journal will offer e-mail, Web browsing, and audio and video capabilities and will cost about as much as a moderately priced laptop.

Consumers who don't want to invest in a dedicated reading device can instead obtain software that enables them to read e-books on their existing desktop PC, laptop computer, or PDA. These programs provide the same types of functions that dedicated devices provide, such as annotation, highlighting, search, and word lookup.

Book-viewing software options include the Glassbook Reader, a program from Glassbook Inc. , Waltham, Mass., that is used to download e-books from the company's website or other online booksellers and view them in full-color PDF format. The software, which is compatible with PCs running Windows and will shortly be available for Macintosh computers, will in the future be able to display e-books created in the Open eBook Publication Structure format. The basic Glassbook Reader software can be downloaded for free; the Glassbook Plus Reader program, which offers additional features, costs $39.

Microsoft is also getting into the business, having recently debuted Microsoft Reader software for viewing e-books on PDAs and computers. The company says its e-book interface's ClearType display technology makes text two to three times clearer to read on-screen. E-books converted into the Microsoft Reader format or compatible with the Open eBook specification can be read via this application. Barnes & Noble.com is selling e-books that run on the Microsoft Reader software.

An early version of Microsoft Reader was introduced this spring bundled with PDA pocket PC devices running the Windows operating system. These devices are sold by companies such as Casio Computer, Compaq Computer, and Hewlett-Packard and range in price from about $280 to $600. They possess Microsoft Word, e-mail, Web surfing, and many other capabilities in addition to the e-book reading function. They offer color displays and can hold hundreds of books. Just this month, a free downloadable version of Microsoft Reader for Windows-based PCs and laptops was released on Microsoft's website.

On the origin of e-books

E-book sources are as diverse as the reading mechanisms used to view them. An electronic book can start its life as a printed text and then be converted into an electronic file, either by a traditional publishing company or by a conversion company. For instance, OverDrive , a firm based in Cleveland, can undertake the conversion process on behalf of individuals or publishers or provide software for them to do it themselves. If a book is created in digital form in the first place, it may simply need to be transformed into an electronic format suitable for customers' e-book reading devices.

The text is often written by an author working with a traditional publishing company. But the ease and minimal cost of digital publishing has lowered the barrier to the marketplace. So an independent writer may prepare the work and in a sense self-publish it, sometimes by working through a company that makes the digital material accessible to potential customers online.

One such company is Xlibris, which designs and lays out an author's book and stores it in a digital file. The e-book is then added to Xlibris' online bookstore, where customers can purchase it directly. It can also be obtained through online booksellers or through ordering desks at brick-and-mortar bookstores.

Another company that publishes and sells writings from individuals is MightyWords . The firm concentrates on what it terms "eMatter," which is "longer than an article, shorter than a book." MightyWords carries more than 10,000 digital works, including speeches, essays, white papers, and research reports in PDF. Authors pay a dollar a month to list their works on the company's website and set the sales price themselves. Offerings include the 29-page "Those Who Lapse: Are Mavericks Bad Scientists or Just Unlucky?" for $2.00 and the 20-page "Solid Oxide Fuel Cells for a New Millennium" for $4.00.

Other sites to purchase science-related e-books include 1stBooks Library, which lists more than 4,000 PDF titles overall, including "Alternative Methods for Teaching Chemistry" for $3.95; powells.com, which sells more than 3,000 RocketEdition e-books, such as "Great Feuds in Science" for $19.96; and Barnes & Noble.com, which markets thousands of e-books, including the RocketEdition of "Probable Tomorrows: How Science & Technology Will Transform Our Lives in the Next Twenty Years" for $19.96. Meanwhile, Amazon.com hasn't plunged into the fray to any significant extent yet. The company says it may make more e-books available on its website "as these books become available in larger numbers" from publishers.

Although the main focus has been on consumer books thus far, electronic textbooks are on the way. NetLibrary , based in Boulder, Colo., is currently negotiating with publishers for content and hopes to get electronic textbooks into the hands of students and professors by the fall of 2001. The company isn't restricting its products to a digital replication of traditional printed textbooks. Its MetaText e-textbook offering will allow professors to customize course content by interweaving other digital resources into texts in the syllabus, adding annotations, highlighting key concepts, or linking to other Internet resources, for instance. NetLibrary says professors will be able to track student progress with the system.

In addition to textbooks, netLibrary carries 25,000 e-book titles--including "Everyday Science Experiments in the Kitchen" and "Great Jobs for Chemistry Majors"--from more than 300 publishers.

NetLibrary has also set up an infrastructure that enables academic, corporate, and public libraries to loan e-books to their patrons. More than 1,000 libraries have signed up, in effect creating virtual analogs of their brick-and-mortar facilities.

The service permits library patrons to check out an e-book online. The borrower can read the e-book on a computer at the library or access it over the Internet from an outside PC. Access to the book file expires once the loan period is up, and the e-book is then free to be checked out by another of the library's patrons--analogous to how printed books are managed in a traditional library. For a popular title, a library might choose to buy more than one e-book copy so more than a sole patron can read it at any one time.

Everybook has a two-screen reader under development. [© John Rudy Photography]

The netLibrary interface allows users to do more than check out a book. It can search the library's collection by keyword, a phrase, or an idea, and pull up the relevant e-books and the particular pages on which the requested information appears. Users can highlight and annotate the text within an e-book, and save their notations if they plan to view the e-book again.

A digital library has the advantage of making books available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And netLibrary notes on its website that an online library also "reduces or eliminates overhead and infrastructure costs associated with book storage, replacement, and maintenance." In addition, "interlibrary loans can be handled via the Internet, eliminating the need for shipping expenses and ending the delay associated with traditional loans."

Wedded to print

E-books have many appealing features, but sometimes nothing but a printed book will do. That's where "print on demand" (POD) services come in. NetLibrary and Xerox announced this June that they are developing a printing and binding system to produce paperback books on demand at kiosks in retail outlets. The book contents will be distributed to the kiosks over the Internet. NetLibrary notes that this single-copy production method will help booksellers and institutions "offer their customers and constituents an expanded selection of books without adding inventory." In-store POD books will be manufactured in five to 15 minutes, depending on the size of the book.

Lightning Source , a subsidiary of Ingram Industries based in La Vergne, Tenn., is one of the companies that is already an old hand at POD. It prints hardcover or paperback books from its digital stock of 10,000 titles in runs as small as a single volume for publishers, booksellers, and libraries as needed. More than 600 publishers have provided texts to Lightning Source as either hard copy--which is scanned in by Lightning--or digital files. The company can print a 300-page book in less than a minute and ship it to a publisher within 48 hours.

Late this summer, the firm will also begin fulfilling orders for e-books in a variety of formats including Microsoft Reader and Adobe Acrobat. Content is restricted to black and white, but this hasn't dampened demand. In fact, the company recently printed its 1 millionth on-demand book. Among its science titles are Cambridge University Press's "Physics & Chemistry of the Upper Atmosphere."

The companies mentioned in this story represent a mere cross-section of the busily evolving e-book industry. Initially the province of specialized electronics firms, small publishers, and quixotic authors, the business is now benefiting from the sizable bankrolls, higher profile, and greater credibility of major companies. With such backing, it's likely that the limitations of e-books will be overcome, vindicating e-book enthusiasts and providing e-book foes with a tool that they can grudgingly accept.

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OK, I'll admit it--I love holding a hardcover book, and I've always thought that I would hate to give up the pleasure of that sensation. So I was skeptical about using a digital book. But I tried out an e-book reader the other day--and now I know what I want for Christmas.

The first surprise is how small it is, just the dimensions of a paperback. It feels . . . friendly? One edge of the reader is roundly contoured to sit comfortably in your hand. Once you call up a book on the touch-sensitive screen with a fingertip or stylus, you can flip from page to page with the touch of a button. Or you can use an on-screen menu to go right to a particular page or chapter. Alternatively, you can jump to where you placed a digital bookmark in the text, search for a keyword, or look up the definition of an unfamiliar word. The controls are fairly intuitive and quickly learned.

[Photo by Svetla Baykoucheva]

Some people seem primed for e-books. One of my American Chemical Society colleagues who tried it out couldn't tear her eyes off of it, even while walking through the hallways. A fellow passenger on the subway was even intrigued by the pages I'd printed out from an e-book website. "Are e-books really coming?" he wanted to know. "They can't be stopped," I replied. And I no longer feel I want to stand in their way.

But a nonscientific survey of a handful of other colleagues indicates I may be in the minority. One tester wrinkled her nose at the mere thought of trying out the Rocket e-book. Most complained that, at 22 oz, it's too heavy. Some felt that the type was very readable; others noted that it's harder to read than on a printed page because contrast is lower and letter edges are jagged. Turning on the backlight helps, but that drains the battery faster. The on-screen writing pad function, where you poke at a schematic of a key pad with the stylus, is awkward and slow.

Here are some other impressions from the group I informally surveyed:

"It's a pleasure to read a book printed on beautiful paper. It has aesthetic value. But an e-book is utilitarian. I can't see reading a book for pleasure with it. And it would never take the place of reading a book to a child."

"A book is more than its content. 'One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest' is an important book in my life, and I like having it on my bookshelf."

"I'm a bibliophile. And that word is about libraries, about books, about going to bookstores and browsing and picking up books and opening them for the first time. That is a huge hurdle for e-books to overcome."

"A printed book is hard to beat. It's light, and you can see the entire scope of the publication. When I look at a page on the e-book screen, I can see so little of the book that it's like looking through a peephole."

"There are some electronic things that make life more difficult rather than easier, and e-books are at that stage. They have much farther to go before they're practical."

"You continually have to adjust how you hold it so you don't get glare off the screen."

"I want that manual touch; I want to be able to flip through the pages. Though when your bookmark falls out of a book, that's annoying."

"It's easier to read than I thought it would be. I anticipated it would be like reading on a computer screen."

"I didn't think I would like to read it, but it's absolutely, totally cool."

"The find function is a big improvement over a regular book. You can go crazy looking for something in a book."

"My sons would like the word look-up function. They won't pick up a dictionary, but with an e-book, the dictionary is right there."

"An e-book would be helpful with reference books or for downloading and carrying around a compendium of journal articles if you were going to put a review article together. If you were going on a trip, it would be a tidy way of doing that."

"If you wanted to take a pile of guidebooks to Europe, it would be much nicer just to take an e-book. And you could search for the pages on Florence."

"If you were stuck at home with the power out, you could read an e-book because of the backlight."

"You could stand on the subway and read this. Trying to turn the pages of a printed book on a train is a pain."

Overall, my reviewers agreed that e-books are suited to specialized situations where a traditional book has drawbacks, for instance when it's important to have up-do-date content or multimedia features. In the near future, that may mean that e-books complement rather than supplant printed books.

Sophie Wilkinson

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