Will e-books change the way we read?

In the outside world, where technologically-related acronyms don't necessarily reign supreme, the term WGA doesn't refer to Windows Genuine Advantage, but to the Writers Guild of America, which has been on strike for about a month to try to force the Hollywood studios to give them a bigger slice of the digital pie. And now writers of more traditional content are starting to wonder whether they need to worry as well.

For example, members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) are currently concerned about the effects of e-books and other digital distribution methods on their trade. Michael Capobiano, president of SFWA, explains:

Right now members of SFWA are pretty evenly divided about when or even whether e-books will become the predominant format for selling their work, and, even though no one thinks it will happen in the next few years, many think it's inevitable. Some authors are finding that they can use free e-books as a form of promotion for their paper books, but there is considerable debate about the long-term effects of this strategy.

It stands to reason that recent technologies, such as television, motion pictures, and audio recordings, would have been impacted by the Internet and other digital technologies sooner than older technologies such as, say, the printing press. (Or perhaps it's simply that the RIAA panicked a lot earlier than publishers did.) And that impact is radically changing the way we experience media, including what we watch (such as user-created content on YouTube), where we get it from, and how we pay for it (or, in some cases, avoid paying for it).

On the other hand, e-books have been a lot longer in coming -- and for good reason. Few people have the patience to read text on small mobile displays (and I say this as someone who has been downloading novels from Project Gutenberg into my PDA for years). And until recently, the few e-readers available were expensive, had a limited library, and just weren't very good.

But that may have changed. I recently had the chance to play with the Sony Reader, and I was surprised at how easy on the eyes it was -- clear, sharp, and without the subtle (or not-so-subtle) reflections that even the best PDA/phone surface suffers from. Quality like that is bound to make devices like the Sony Reader and Amazon's Kindle more of a reality in the market than e-book readers have been up until now. Certainly, the Kindle is getting a lot of attention; as I write this in early December, the Kindle is sold out on Amazon's site and customers told they cannot get one by Christmas.

So are we at the tipping point where print starts moving inexorably to a digital medium? Not quite yet. The form factor of the typical paperback book is still convenient enough (and the price low enough) that most readers aren't going to be rushing out to spend a few hundred dollars on a new way to access their literature -- especially when, as in the Kindle, they have to pay ten cents to look at text that they already own. (Really -- Amazon's Kindle description states that "Each Kindle has a unique and customizable e-mail address…. This allows you and your contacts to e-mail Word documents and pictures wirelessly to your Kindle for only $.10.")

In addition, the day of the one-use-only mobile device has been on the wane for a while -- if the standalone PDA has pretty much disappeared in favor of the phone/PDA combo, why would people want to add a device that only has one purpose? (Although it looks like the Kindle may have more uses than Amazon wants to publicize -- see Mike Elgan's interesting article Amazon Kindle does e-mail and more.)

At some point, though, we will hit that tipping point, and the technology that brought us Chaucer, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, and Danielle Steele will give way to one that makes it easier to carry around a large number of books, easier to buy books immediately, and easier to tweak your print size. It will be interesting to watch how that will affect what we read, whose work we read, and, in fact, whether we read at all.

How about you? Will you jump on the e-book bandwagon as soon as they become a little more affordable (or a little more converged)? Or will they take your paper books away only when they pry them out of your cold, dead hands? Add your comment below!