Christina Bell, of Mitcham's Central Book Services, browses her e-reader over coffee.
Photo: Pat Scala

For more than 10 years, the e-book has been hyped as the "next big thing" in world publishing — a prediction usually underpinned by dire prophecies about the imminent death of the conventional "hard" book.

Now, more than a decade since the launch of the first clunky, chunky, expensive e-readers (one of which lost its stored information when the batteries were changed), the e-book era seems finally to have dawned, at least in the US.  >>>