The ebook has entered the market timidly and with limited impact but it doesn't take a lot of vision to see it's going to be huge.

Ebooks will boom like the mobile phone industry, and in less than a decade will demise all printed papers, books and magazines, which will be a blessing to the environment.

To be honest I can't wait to buy a Sony Reader, now available through Amazon and Waterstones in the UK. This little cute gadget is going to be so much more than the next ipod. It's easy to see this - after all the written word is so much more predominant in our day to day business than music tracks. The ipod demised the CD player, and itunes turned the whole music industry upside down, to the benefit of the consumer - no more trips to the shop to buy a CD while you can download thousands of tracks for the fraction of the price and manage it all in a small gadget very efficiently. 

The ebook will cover so much more ground. Forget about buying expensive books and magazines, if you can browse an itunes equivalent of a bookshop and download all you want to read. I imagine that internet bookstores like Amazon will re-invent themselves to offer ebooks to download and eventually phase out the hardcopy books (except for eccentrics like those who collect vinyl LPs).

I can only dream of all the space that would be freed up getting rid of dusty bookcases, and no more weighty books in the handbag. It sounds like my idea of heaven.

Imagine having the day's newspapers beamed to your ebook on your way to work and then browse all the papers you want while you travel on the tube! No more inky fingers, etc, plus you can get so much more information (and diversity) by reading several newspapers.

There are many reasons to object to printed newspapers - apart from the carcinogenic ink and the waste of paper (we don't read the bulk of it), they are simply impractical to carry and to read. In fact, younger savvier generations are turning to reading news online, which is causing plummeting sales in the printed sector, and a good thing too. The ebook will deliver the final blow and then everyone will simply go electronic.   

At the moment the number of books available to read with the Sony reader is quite limited but it is easy to see this will soon change. You can't help feeling this is a moment like when mobile phones where at their infancy -for those of us old enough to remember that in the 80's only inadequate yuppies carried those brick-sized objects around. We all had opinions on the subject and only the visionary saw the clumsy thing was going to take off the way it did. Now it's obvious the ebook is destined to a similarly stellar future. It is our decarbonised future.

Brunella Bell

brunella@carbonica.org

PS An update with two interesting articles on Kindle II, Amazon's new ebook reader: "Kindle2: Style Over Substance" (Forbes.com) and "Amazon Unveils Latest E-Book Tablet" (Carbonica News)

For those of you who want to compare, here is an interesting comparison article: "Showdown: Kindle 2 vs. Sony Reader" (as far as I am concerned, I think both are great, and there's plenty of room for many other competitors, but for the time being these two are battling it out to dominate the market).

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