E Books

It is late at night. The bedroom is dark, and I am lost in a novel about a 9-year-old girl who is sold into slavery to a geisha house in 1930's Japan. The book has no pages, no binding. Reading it requires no external light; my face is bathed in the blue-white glow of its backlit screen. It is an electronic book, the Rocket eBook, a gadget the size of a mass-market paperback. Like the SoftBook - on which you see these words - it is among the first of a new generation of electronic books.

How much would you pay for a book? Not for a rare book, a Shakespeare folio or a Gutenberg Bible to keep under glass, but for a volume simply to grace your bookshelves or your coffee table. Would $199 be too much? Sports artist Dick Perez hopes that 5,000 people are willing to put out that amount for The Immortals , a collection of his portraits of Baseball Hall of Famers. What about $461.62? That's what online bookseller Amazon is asking for Microsoft executive-turned-chef Nathan Myhrvold 's new, six-volume culinary compendium Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking . How about $15,000, the publisher's list price for the "Champ's Edition" of GOAT: A Tribute to Muhammad Ali (Greatest of All Time )

NEW YORK- The e-book boom has reached new heights, but not high enough to boost book sales overall. Helped by millions of Kindles, Nooks and other digital devices given for holiday gifts, e-book sales jumped in January and surpassed purchases of hardcovers and mass-market paperbacks, according to a new survey. The Association of American Publishers reported yesterday that e-sales more than doubled from $32.4 million in January 2010 to $69.9 million in January 2011. Hardcovers sales fell from $55.4 million to $49.1 million, and mass-market paperbacks, a format that's declining as baby boomers seek books with larger print, fell from $56.4 million to $39 million.

Buyers of e-books should make sure they get their fair share of a settlement agreed to by several of the nation's biggest publishers, advises the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office. The $69 million credit-or-refund deal applies to e-books purchased in every state but Minnesota from April 1, 2010, to May 21 of this year if they were published by Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Macmillan, or certain imprints or subsidiaries of those companies, which allegedly charged inflated prices or fixed prices.

'I don't go anywhere without my boyfriend Kindle," says Jen Pechet, a self-professed addict to Amazon's popular e-book reader. She takes it to bed, the dentist's chair, the sidelines of her sons' baseball and lacrosse games, the grocery store parking lot, and the carpool line at school. Pechet was a serious reader before, but the Kindle has upped the ante, luring her to read as many as three books in a single day. Since getting the device in June, she's lined the shelves of her digital library with more than 500 books (that's an average of 41 a month!

At age 91, Ray Bradbury is making peace with the future he helped predict. The science fiction/fantasy author and longtime enemy of the e-book has finally allowed his dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451 to be published in digital format. Simon & Schuster released the electronic edition Tuesday at a list price of $9.99. First published in paperback by Ballantine in 1953 and as a hardcover by Simon & Schuster in the 1960s, Fahrenheit 451 has sold more than 10 million copies and has been translated into 33 languages.

In July, when I went on vacation, I decided to take along the essays of Michel de Montaigne - all of them, in a single volume running to 3,271 pages. A heavy and unwieldy choice, right? Not at all. The whole thing fitted nicely into a packet less than half an inch thick and weighing just nine ounces. Welcome to Sony Reader. I downloaded the Montaigne volume from Sony's online e-book store - cost me about $3, if memory serves - but the model of Sony's digital device that I was sent for review already included four other complete books (among them, oddly enough, George Orwell's 1984)

NORTH PHILLY-BORN and -raised comedian Kevin Hart is opening his wallet to give kids free e-book access to Lorene Carey 's Free! Great Escapes from Slavery on the Underground Railroad . Illustrations for the children's book, about the harrowing experiences of brave individuals who escaped the tyranny of slavery, were done by Please Touch Museum artist-in-residence, Beth Lewis . The free e-book, made possible through Hart's generous...

Are you a mature adult curious about those newfangled digital reading tablets? The Free Library of Philadelphia has a deal for you. Nook e-readers preloaded with best sellers and classics are available for two-week loans to library-card holders age 50 and up who owe no fines and can produce a photo ID that matches the name and address on their library card. Better yet, the library will teach you how to use the device - or any Kindle, iPad, Android or Sony e-reader you own or receive as a holiday present.