For the past 570 years, the primary technology for disseminating information throughout societies has been the printing press. The main output of that device has been what we know as books — constructions made of paper, bound in card stock, and stamped with words using liquid ink. But, that is suddenly in the process of changing with the introduction of electronic books, such as the Kindle from Amazon.

According to an article in The International Journal of the Book,¹ e-books are at about the same place in terms of their technological development and cultural acceptance as physical books were in the late 15^th century. Before that, when people talked about “real books,” they meant the illuminated manuscripts that monks copied by hand, letter for letter. Those books sometimes took decades to copy, and they were kept by the church and by kings. Only approved subjects were written about, and only approved scholars had access to them.

Even after the publication of Gutenberg’s Bible on a printing press in 1445, people did not immediately embrace this new technology. In fact, it was met with derision and suspicion. Printed books were viewed as inferior — even dangerous. For one thing, they represented a loss of control of information. Anyone with Gutenberg’s machine could print any sort of revolutionary idea and disseminate it at will.

So far, e-books have not been widely embraced either. Some people view them with suspicion and with the fear that they will displace “real books.” Others simply view them as a solution for which there exists no problem: Traditional books work just fine. Still others have leapt at the chance to take a trip on an airplane or a commuter train while carrying a hundred, or even a thousand, books embodied in the slim e-reader tucked easily away in a briefcase or backpack.

At the moment, e-books are also suffering from a lack of standardization that afflicts many new technologies. While Kindle is the leader, Barnes & Noble recently introduced its competitive Nook reader, and Sony has had an e-book reader out for some time now. Fujitsu has its Flepia, while Samsung announced its Papyrus. In fact, according to ZDNet,² there are 52 new...