In 2000, someone at a party told me that very soon books would be obsolete. The Rocket eBook had been around for less than a year, billed itself as the “first usable, mass-marketed electronic book,” and could hold a whopping 10 novels. Other competitors were also generating a lot of press—these included the Gemstar, the Everybook, the SoftBook, and the confidently named Librius Millenium Reader (I can’t help hearing here the theme to Conan O’Brien’s “In the Year 2000″ skits). The “death-of-the-book” meme—as old as the computer—had once again been revived.

Today we know that reports of the death of books had—yet again—been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the e-book bubble quickly burst, and the digital text utopia did not arrive. People were buying neither e-books nor e-book readers. While the analog book had been evolved to gratify human sensibilities over millenia, e-book readers still had significant problems to overcome in the area of user interface. A 1999 article in the New York Times on whether such devices meant “the end of the story for books” offered some good reasons for skepticism—or at least cautious optimism:

Robert Darnton, a professor of history at Princeton University who has championed electronic publishing for scholarly dissertations, said, ”I think it’s only a matter of time before we can have mechanical devices that will make possible a satisfactory but new experience of reading.”

But he conceded: ”One thing that seems to be missing is paper, the feel of a book when you hold it, its grain, its texture, its elasticity, its whiteness. The sensation of paper is bound up in the experience of reading. We have a long-term kinetic memory of paper. How will we substitute a new medium for it or improve on it?”

Designers of e-book readers were well aware of the need for them to be book-like. The Rocket eBook was the size of a paperback. Other devices were weighted to the heft of an actual book. One device, by Everybook, tried to get closer to the feel of traditional books by using facing LCD screens. But these were not innovations that readers wanted to curl up with. The problem seemed to be the screen itself.

User reticence about digital reading was already a well-known fact. Electronic texts weren’t themselves new: The Gutenberg Project had been digitizing texts since 1971. Yet computer-based reading hadn’t taken off, even on the Palm Pilot, which had been around since 1996. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen was prescient at least in part:

“It’s a pure matter of technology: The screen resolution is too bad. We know from human-factor studies that reading speed is 25 percent lower on the screen than on the printed page.”

Nielsen thought that 300-dpi screens might solve the problem by providing the same clarity as that of print.

But as resolution improved, it became clear that it wasn’t the only problem. The fact that electronic screens are back-lit makes it both un-book-like and unpleasant for long-term reading. What was required was “digital ink” on a screen (or even paper-like medium) that reflected light in the same way as a real book. Xerox and MIT had been diligently working on this problem while the first wave of e-book reader hype came and went.

Eight years later, the fruits of work on “digital ink” (and “electronic paper”) are only just making themselves known. Today we have the iLiad (2006), the Sony Reader (2007), the soon-to-be iRiver eBook Reader, and the just-released Amazon Kindle.

With the Kindle, Amazon has one-upped other available readers by offering a wireless connection (via Sprint’s EV-DO network) that allows access to Web content and does away with the problem of synchronization to a computer. Unfortunately, the device costs $399, books at least $10 apiece, newspapers $15 a month, and blog subscriptions $2 a month. A $399 price point for the device is a problem, and history has not been kind to paid subscription models when it comes to Web content. And as Jay points out, we can’t yet be confident that we can get the books we want in electronic format. Further, PDFs will need to be converted to the Kindle’s proprietary format to be read on the device. So despite digital ink and wireless access, there are still some significant barriers to entry for users interested in e-books.

But beyond cost, content, and format, there is still the question of user interface. Do we yet have a device that gives readers enough of the full experience of reading a regular book to be a real breakthrough (as Robert Darnton puts it, “the feel of a book when you hold it, its grain, its texture, its elasticity, its whiteness”)? Perhaps we’ll need something that is much more book-like in look and feel—including multiple (digitally inked) pages that bend—before reading on an electronic device doesn’t seem, at a primal level, sterile and less gratifying than the real thing.