The form of the book has changed over the ages often driven by the technology used in making the book. Books made of paper today are not how books have always been. Things like page numbers, table of contents, and indexes have all came about since Gutenberg. The book is going through another change of form with the advent of the e-book and the eReader.

This is my latest eReader, a Cool-er eReader. My first eReader was a desktop computer. A more successful eReader was my laptop. I guess the utility of an eReader can be measured by how suitable it is to take to the bathroom. The latest eReaders rate high in this regard.

While some eReaders use LCD screens, the new generation eReaders use eInk screens. Check out the link to see what makes these screens different. They are much easier to read for long periods of time, take much less energy, and are more compact. Amazon started the eInk ball rolling with the Kindle but now all sorts of eInk eReaders are popping up. The Cool-er is smaller than the Kindle. The demo I saw had the demonstrator pull it out of his inside coat pocket. I thought that he must have a custom made coat pocket but the Cool-er actually fits in all my inside coat pockets.

The Kindle is a little larger for the same size screen but it has a little keyboard and is wireless in that you can order books and have them downloaded directly from the Kindle while the Cool-er has to have books loaded from your computer via USB. This is seen as an advantage for the Kindle but there lies the rub for the Kindle is a closed system. You can only load it with books purchased from Amazon and you don't buy books from Amazon, you rent them. The books come with digital rights management (DRM). Amazon also has the capability to remove books from your Kindle without your permission. I don't buy my music with DRM (and I do buy digital music) and I have no interest in buying books with DRM. Fortunately there is an excellent source of non-DRM books: Project Gutenberg. These are books that have no copyright. They are often called classics.

There is a new format for e-Books, it's EPUB. It's an open standard that can have DRM but also can do without it. Project Gutenberg has been converting their text files to EPUB format. EPUB is the MP3 of publishing.

I find reading the eInk screen works just fine. I've read the first three novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs "The Princess of Mars" series and am well into Dickens "The Pickwick Papers". Also loaded on my Cool-er is Darwins "Origin of the Species" and all six volumes of Gibbons "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". More to come. I love it. This doesn't mean I'm getting rid of my paper books.

Here are a couple of articles that elaborate on some of the e-book issues.

Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book
Unless Amazon embraces open standards, the Kindle's lead will become a very short story.

"The Amazon Kindle has sparked huge media interest in e-books and has seemingly jump-started the market. Its instant wireless access to hundreds of thousands of e-books and seamless one-click purchasing process would seem to give it an enormous edge over other dedicated e-book platforms. Yet I have a bold prediction: Unless Amazon embraces open e-book standards like epub, which allow readers to read books on a variety of devices, the Kindle will be gone within two or three years.

"To understand why I say that, I'll need to share a bit of history.

"In 1994, at an industry conference, I had an exchange with Nathan Myhrvold, then Microsoft's ( MSFT - news - people ) chief technology officer. Myhrvold had just shown a graph that prefigured Chris Anderson's famous "long tail" graph by well over a decade. Here's what I remember him saying: "Very few documents are read by millions of people. Millions of documents--notes to yourself, your spouse, your friends--are read by only a few people. There's an entire space in the middle, though, that will be the basis of a new information economy. That's the space that we are making accessible with the Microsoft Network." (These aren't Myhrvold's exact words but the gist of his remarks as I remember them.)

"During the Q&A, I said: "What you said is completely right, but it's not the Microsoft Network that is going to deliver that information economy. It's the World Wide Web." "

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How to Destroy the Book, by Cory Doctorow

"We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.

"Copyright recognizes this. It says that when you buy a book, you own the book. It’s yours to give away, yours to keep, yours to license or to borrow, to inherit or to be included in your safe for your children. For centuries, copyright has acknowledged that sacred connection between readers and their books. We think of copyright as something that regulates things within a bunch of buckets—DVDs, video games, records—but books are more than all of these things. Books are older than copyright. Books are older than publishing. Books are older than printing!

"The anti-copyright activists have no respect for our copyright and our books. They say that when you buy an ebook or an audiobook that’s delivered digitally, you are demoted from an owner to a licensor. From a reader to a mere user. These thieves deliver our digital books and our audiobooks wrapped in license agreements and technologies that might as well be designed to destroy the emotional connection that readers have with their books."

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