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So what are book lovers to make of the electronic book? In this volatile time when the latest technology claims last a nanosecond, digital content providers promise us the moon. Electronic books, they assert, will cost readers less money, save publishers warehousing and overhead costs, and allow pastors and missionaries in Third World countries to access resources more quickly via the Internet. Authors will be able to self-publish their titles; bulky textbooks will be replaced by sleek laptops or handheld devices; and those quirky little tomes we love but that don't sell well will never go out of print.

Whether all of these things are true or just hype, one major appeal of the electronic book is its instant gratification for a fast-food generation. Digital books—via online bookstores such as Amazon.com or bn.com—are accessible 24/7. If you crave the latest bestseller at 2 a.m., you can download it to your PC in seconds. There's no shipping delay, and no out-of-stock apologies.

Business is betting on electronic books. According to research by Accenture, in just five years, 28 million of us will be adopting some sort of device to read our books electronically, whether through our PCs, a handheld reading device, or even a special mobile phone. Accenture also found that more than half of consumers, regardless of their age, want to use digital media—including audio, interactive television, and e-books. If these estimates hold true, Accenture predicts the market for digital books will be $2.3 billion in five years. The Wall Street Journal also quotes Dick Brass, vice president of technology at Microsoft, as predicting that 20 to 40 percent of all online text sales will be electronic in three to five years.

In case you've missed the e-book so far, an easy way to sample the technology is to go to www.amazon.com/ebooks/ and download the Microsoft Reader program. Classic titles, such as Moby Dick, are available for free downloading to your laptop or home PC, or you can choose from more than a thousand titles for sale on the site (ebooks.bn.com is another option). In addition to reading content on your home PC or laptop, you can also read specially-formatted e-books on dedicated reading devices such as Gemstar's eBook, which retails for around $300, or Franklin's eBookMan starting at $129.95. Other specialty e-books can be read on devices such as Palm Pilots.

Most e-book content is formatted in its digital language, then encrypted for copyright protection. Once you purchase an electronic book title from a Web site, there's often a verification process to make sure you got it legally, then it's yours for life—but you can't share it with friends, unless they look at it on your reading device or PC. Once purchased, e-books are not returnable.

Digital books have been around for several years, but early dedicated reading devices were often cumbersome and expensive. The sleek NuvoMedia Rocket eBook (which merged with SoftBook in an early 2000 buyout by Gemstar) cracked open the religious market in 1999 when InterVarsity Press and Broadman & Holman Publishers both issued several titles in the format to test Christian readership interest.

But the big break came last summer when Microsoft launched its Reader—a free program used to render books on PC screens and handheld Pocket PCs rather than having to purchase a special device. Suddenly, former e-book skeptics sat up and took notice. As Michael Hyatt, executive vice president and publisher at Thomas Nelson Publishers in Nashville says, "When you bet on Microsoft, it's usually pretty safe."

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February 19 2001, Vol. 45, No. 3