Early boosters of digital technology predicted a paperless world, where we would carry around all our books in electronic form, storing a whole library in a tiny device. Long before the web was invented, Project Gutenberg used the old text-only Internet to build a large repository of free public-domain books stored as plain text. These e-texts were useful to scholars and students who wanted searchable versions of classics, but, for lack of portable reader, they did nothing to replace the book.

For years, I have been reading in the technology press about the failure of the electronics industry to design a usable e-book reader: Many expensive devices intended to replace the old-fashioned paper book have been introduced, and they have not been successful. All the commentaries in the technology pages complain that "until there is an e-book reader that you can take in the bath or read comfortably under a tree, no one will read e-books."

A few months ago, I discovered almost accidentally that there already is a substantial (if still somewhat obscure) body of e-books in actual use. I purchased my first mobile phone (despite being an "early adopter" of most new technology, I had steadfastly resisted becoming "one of those cell phone people"). I chose a phone which could do email and web browsing. Once I got it set up, I did some Googling to find out what else I could do with the phone, and I discovered Mobipocket, a French website (recently acquired by Amazon) which distributes a free e-book reader for mobile phones and PDAs, along with a PC version (also free) which allows you to order books from Mobipocket's store and organize your e-book and e-news (the reader is also an offline RSS reader) collection. You can also read your e-books on the computer.

One of the best aspects of the Mobipocket site is the large collection of free e-books (over 15,000 in French and English). Almost every imaginable classic book which is in the public domain in English or French is available for free, and there are also many obscure titles.

Before long, I had loaded up my phone (equipped with a 1 GB mini-SD memory card) with unabridged volumes of Proust, the entire text of Tristram Shandy, and Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, among many others. I also gave in to temptation and bought some paying e-books. It amused me to read Seth Lloyd's book on quantum computing on a tiny little cell phone screen. Unfortunately, many e-books are the same price as the physical paperback book, which is quite expensive, and even the least expensive commercial e-books sell for around $10.

Reading e-books on a mobile phone or PDA does not provide the perfect reading experience one gets from a real book, but the convenience of carrying large numbers of books in a tiny device makes up for it. The text size, font, and colors can be changed to minimize eyestrain which is very helpful as the default bright white background gave off a lot of glare on my phone. The reader has an option to automatically scroll the text (you can adjust the scrolling speed) so that you can read hands-free. This works well for light reading, but I found that I needed to flip the pages manually when reading more complex texts (or texts with images). You can attach bookmarks and annotations to texts as you read them, and, if you get a dictionary in the Mobipocket format, you can look words up as you read with a single click. Mobipocket also has free software (for PC only), which I have not tried, to convert your own PDF, Word, or text documents to their e-book format. You can then upload your own e-books to the e-book store, where you can sell them or distribute them for free.