Durability
The readability of an ebook won't degrade over time. The pages won't crumble because of high acid content, the binding can never break, and there can be no variations in the ink. Despite being criticized for their inconvenience and for being hard to read, ebooks are often more convenient than their paper based counterparts.

Print books long from extinct
Promoters and publishers of traditional books often think that ebooks are in danger of replacing paper books. It's not likely that ebooks will ever be able to completely and totally replace print books, nor should they. Regardless of future developments in e-reading technology, the book market will have plenty of room for paper books for quite some time. However, the print book market will change and shift as a result of the ebook.

In the present, and for a large chunk of the foreseeable future, paper books will continue to provide the primary source for textual information, and traditional books will continue to be a commonplace in our culture. It seems that ebooks and print books are able to complement each other's strengths and weaknesses quite well.

Print books will remain as collector's items. The coffee table book won't be replaced for quite some time, and given that there's still a rather large market for hardback and paperback books, there's no danger of them disappearing anytime soon. Not only are print books holding their own against ebooks in market share, but they also have several features that ebooks are not able to match.

For starters, everyone is used to paper books. They know how to use them, how to mark their place, how to annotate them, how to organize them, and where to get them. With ebooks, this isn't always the case. People don't know that they can go to stores like Fictionwise (at http://www.fictionwise.com) or Palm Digital Media (at http://www.palmdigitalmedia.com) and buy popular ebook titles for reasonable prices.

The long road ahead for ebooks
Most people are relatively clueless how to deal with, manipulate, and manage a digital file, and while this isn't really a problem among Palm OS users, they aren't the only people who read books. The attachment to paper books isn't without reason: paper has a higher quality than the digital screens we have available today. White or off-white paper printed with black ink displays a precision and quality that is unobtainable in any kind of ebook reader. Even the highest-grade screens have a quality of about half of what books have been offering for hundreds of years.

eBooks are not yet commonplace, and many people are scared of the unknown aspect of ebooks. eBook technology hasn't yet developed to the point where ebooks can truly compete with traditional books, but in time the features and abilities that are available today, plus new features that will surface in the near future, will allow ebooks to, at the very least, become noticed in the general public. I urge PalmPower's readers to try reading an ebook, especially since Palm computer users already have a very good device for reading ebooks on the go. With all the advantages that ebooks offer readers, it's worth the time to check them out.

In my next article in this series, I'll talk about the mechanics of using your Palm handheld to read ebooks.

Product availability and resources For more information on Fictionwise, visit http://www.fictionwise.com. For more information on Palm Digital Media, visit http://www.palmdigitalmedia.com. For more information on Palm handhelds, visit http://www.palm.com. Easy, flexible article reprints ZATZ now offers a quick, easy, flexible and inexpensive way to use article reprints in your marketing and promotion efforts. You can now get article reprints for a one-time fee of only $200. For details, visit http://mediakit.zatz.com/reprints.

Contributing Editor Bob Draper is a technical writer at Westar Corporation's U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground office. He's also a Green Bay Fan and a certified Mac addict. He can be reached at palmguy@mac.com.