Is the eBook nearly there yet?

The concept of the eBook has been floating around the technological ether for years, and with the advent of the Internet, epaper and similar advances many have predicted the death of the book repeatedly. This week, Andrew Marr of the Guardian road-tested the iRex Iliad (a device we wrote about some time ago!) and proclaimed that while the paper book was likely to be alive and well for years to come the new generation eBooks were readable and portable enough to quickly find their (common)place in society.

I can't conceive of replacing my battered, beloved and above all slightly smelly collection of books with an eBook (you know what I mean... must and dust and many readings lend a distinct biblioscent). But as the technology zooms ahead, what are the options that might tempt a bibliophile like me away from the bookshelves?

The iRex Iliad is undoubtedly a cut above the pack. The electronic ink format means a broad but comfortable reader with a flat, matt page that is easy on the eye. Storage is phenomenal, and you can even scribble in the margins. Indeed, if I could justify buying a device for nearly £500 and then buying more books on top of that to download, it might seem like the perfect solution to carrying around the likes of War and Peace, Gormenghast or The Count of Monte Cristo without serious shoulder strain. And at least the older the book, the less likely it is that DRM will interfere (more about this later).

Sony's Reader is a much cheaper option, but also far less slick and you can't add your own notes. And again the problem of buying a device and then having to pay more to download, unless they're classics from Project Gutenburg, makes this seem prohibitively expensive - leaving aside the fact that you can't populate your shelves with them.

Of course, if portability matters to you more than actually, physically reading, there's always the audiobook. These days you can even stack them on a shelf; the Playaway audiobooks series, "read-to-go audio" have just a single book per unit in an easily portable casette tape sized case. But any reader will tell you it's just not the same. Audiobooks, as far as I'm concerned, are for those times when reading is physically impossible due to driving or suffering from motion sickness.

Anyway, having barely entered it's third technological trimester, industry gossips are already predicting the demise of the eBook. Digital Rights Management (a hopefully temporary irritation, but a die-hard one at that) means that the eBook is already suffering from a lack of takers put off by the potential restrictions on reading matter.

As far as I'm concerned (and I know Andrew Marr's in the same boat), eBooks are for work, documents, pamphlets, reams of stuff that finds itself into to recycling box very quickly. Scientific journals, academic resources and the like have already found themselves a comfortable home on the internet and have a subscriber system, so they're also a very appropriate candidate.

But for actual reading for pleasure, there is nothing in this world that has beaten the humble paperback. It is the most beautiful and yet least distracting way to delve into the outpouring of another's soul and imagination in supreme, elegant, unsurpassable comfort. Let us not forget, also, that it's the only way to achieve true L-space... All that's left for me to question, is what I do with them when I've finished reading my books - if, that is, I can be persuaded to part from them at all.

If you're a Shiny fan and reader, why not check out our book-loving website, Trashionista?