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I'm an excited gadget watcher - I have spent far more money than I should buying new types of pocket computers and fancy mobile phones. I've spent more time than I should have setting them up and having long conversations with technical support agents in a wide range of countries when the latest black or silver box doesn't do what it says in the instruction book.

I've also bought books to download, which can sometimes fill in long train journeys. But I've never really been convinced you can get the 'feel' for a book if it comes in twenty line chunks on a small screen.

Now Amazon has developed it's own version of the , and it looks more likely to succeed than previous attempts. You can read it in sunlight because it uses electronic paper rather than a conventional screen. And it doesn't weigh much. The claim is that it will hold 200 books.

Its big selling point is that it picks up books wirelessly over mobile phone networks - you won't have to connect it to a computer, so hopefully those long conversations with the support technician won't be necessary.

I look forward to checking it out.

If the ebook really catches on and is fully developed it's potentially life-changing. Inevitably capacity will increase until some future generation of the device will be able to hold tens of thousands of books, and search them.

I like the randomness of going through my library picking up books and looking for ideas, just the way I used to like going through newspaper cuttings in a brown folder and getting tangential thoughts.

But I search the newspapers online now, so I guess I could live with searchable libraries too.

The amount of knowledge available would become near enough limitless.

And my books would become artefacts, more important to me for their covers than their contents - just like my 12-in LPs now, which I gaze at for the art but never listen to except as downloads.

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