I received an e-book reader as a holiday gift from my wife this year, and it turns out I'm not alone. According to Forrester Research, a technology consulting firm, sales of e-book readers increased from 1 million in 2008 to 3 million last year leaving the three main producers of the devices with inadequate inventory on hand.

Mine is a Sony Reader, but as far as I can tell the technology for the e-book readers currently on the market is pretty similar. Whether you buy a Kindle from Amazon or the Nook (if you can get one) that Barnes and Noble is selling, or a Sony, all offer backlit readable screens and are about the size of a trade paperback.

There are, of course, bells and whistles and depending on which model you choose, your reader may have a touch screen, be available in color or feature wireless transmission. Some have embedded dictionaries and they allow you to make notes, highlight passages and even add your own drawings, which could be useful if e-books are ever adopted by school systems.

The primary disadvantage of e-books at the moment is the paucity of quality modern and contemporary fiction available in this format. While you can get all the John Grisham or Danielle Steele your heart may desire, good luck on finding, say, Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch or David Lodge. Sony and the Nook, unlike Kindle, do offer access to the Google Free Library, which claims to offer millions of titles, assuming you can find them on their confusing content pages. Google titles are indeed free, but for the present the only books offered are in the public domain. Under U.S. law, what this means is that a work is protected under copyright for 70 years after an author's death. Thus Google can make available works by, say, Edith Wharton, but not Hemingway.

A drawback is that the Google books are scanned into the system from libraries, which results in some rather interesting idiosyncracies. In my e-book copy of "Lord Jim," for example, I found this puzzling line: "A faint voice said, 2 You there? Another cried out shakily, 2 She's gone." That old metafictionist Conrad might have been surprised by these emendations to his prose, but this is the price you pay with scanning.

The problems facing marketers of e-books go way beyond this, however. As the New York Times reported last month, the family of the late William Styron, author of such books as "Sophie's Choice" and "The Confessions of Nat Turner" is in a legal battle with Random House over the rights to e-book versions of Styron's novels. To make matters more confusing, a group of authors has initiated a multimillion dollar class action suit against Google, which has held up the addition of many more titles to its Free Library.

In the future, book contracts will certainly include e-book rights along with provisions for movies, paperback editions and audio books. But one interesting possibility is that some authors may choose to bypass print publication altogether and go directly to e-book publication. Two companies that have already begun signing authors to e-book contracts are Rosetta Books and Symptio, which focuses on religious titles.

One question that arises is what will happen to brick-and-mortar bookstores in the wake of e-books?

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