Don't fear the e-reader: books are evolving, not dying.

• Author: Suderman, Peter

WHEN ONLINE super-retailer Amazon.com first released its Kindle e-reader in the fall of 2007, David Pogue, the influential New York Times tech columnist, exclaimed that the gadget's "instant wireless gratification" was "intoxicating." At The Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg proclaimed, "I love the shopping and downloading experience." Wired named it one of its top 10 devices of the year, calling the Kindle's E Ink screen "fabulous."

But for all the hype, the first generation Kindle wasn't much of a product. It displayed every book in the exact same bland gray font on a screen the color of pea soup. Images, presented in jagged grayscale, were more reminiscent of a monochrome computer monitor from the 1980s than a modern LCD display. The books, locked in a proprietary format, weren't transferable. The keyboard was awkwardly constructed, making note-taking incredibly frustrating. Advancing to the next digital "page" caused the display to flutter and flicker, as flit were struggling to remember what came next. Some early testers reported that the device would occasionally crash entirely.

And at $400, the Kindle aimed to replace comparatively inexpensive stacks of bound paper with a fragile, expensive piece of hardware. Was it even possible to read it in the bathtub? When She New York Times Magazine posed that question, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos responded that he simply stuffs his reader into a one-gallon Ziploc bag, claiming, implausibly, that "it's much better than a physical book, because obviously if you put your physical book in a Ziploc bag you can't turn the pages."

Fragile, slow-witted, dull-green screens trapped inside Ziploc bags? Skeptics could be forgiven for scratching their heads at the idea, put forth by Steven Levy in a Newsweek cover story, that this somehow represented "the future of reading."

Yet the devices flew off the virtual shelves. Amazon was tight-lipped about sales figures, but by May 2008 estimates circulated that Amazon was selling as many as 80,000 of the devices each month. The faster, thinner second generation has proven just as much of a hit, with Slate Editor Jacob Weisberg writing that he believed it offered "a fundamentally better experience" than traditional ink and paper. After ditching its old library, one private academy in Massachusetts decided to install a $500,000 digital learning center--book-free, but with $10,000 worth of Kindles and other e-readers.

Kindles and other e-readers are imperfect devices...