They're hefty, pricey, and you don't want to drop one during a bath, making electronic books a tough sell even after several heavyweight technology companies have jumped into the untested market. That's not much of a marketing motto. Consumers are turned off in part by the price, since the texts cost as much as regular books. There is also the problem of incompatible software formats. It's kind of like the Tower of Babel out there.
Electronic books are basically gadgets aimed at replacing printed pages with digital versions.
Instead of taking books off a shelf, bibliophiles download volume after volume into their electronic reader, and erase them when they want. Downloading can be cumbersome, however. Digital books in Microsoft Corp.'s Reader format, for example, have to be shunted to a personal computer or laptop before they can be switched to a hand-held device. In a significant textbook deal, startup software company Rovia Inc. last week inked a deal with textbooks publisher Houghton Mifflin Co. to deliver material online. A survey by Jupiter Research put the number of electronic reading devices in use in the United States at only 100,000.