Read A Good PowerBook Lately?

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Other firms are working on similar products. Microsoft has published dozens of electronic reference books for IBM-compatible computers. The Slate Corp., an Arizona-based software vendor, has developed software that lets people flip through the pages of an electronic book by flicking a stylus across a touch- sensitive screen. And Booklink, a Florida-based start-up, is designing a notebook-size reading device that could be loaded with digitized books from a cash machine-type dispenser that would serve as an electronic library. By eliminating distribution and warehousing costs, Booklink's backers think they can make classics available for as little as $1 or $2 a title.

Elegant as these products may be, there is no guarantee that even those readers who own the necessary equipment will want to use it for reading novels. If anything, the new paperless books are reminders of how good real books are. As Denise Caruso, editor of the newsletter Digital Media, points out, books are everything that everyone wants the new electronic media to be: portable, intensely personal and highly interactive.

Will readers give up the feel of paper and the smell of ink for a machine whose batteries have to be recharged every three hours? "The great power of the printed book is that it requires no techology; it is accessible to anyone who can read," admits Daniel Boorstin, the former Librarian of Congress and a member of the Modern Library editorial board. Initially at least, the market for computer books will probably be among students and scholars, who can use the electronic features to do productive work, rather than those simply reading for pleasure.

Ultimately, it may be the economics of publishing, not the aesthetics, that determine what shape literature will take. Fiber-optic wires and data- compression techniques make it possible to deliver books -- as well as magazines and newspapers -- over telephone or cable-TV lines. In the future, readers may select what they want to read from a menu of titles and have their choices zapped almost instantly to their portable machines. Old-fashioned books will probably never be entirely displaced, but as the cost of digital information continues to fall, and the environmental and production costs of paper keep rising, the pleasure of buying and reading a new hardbound volume may someday be limited to the few who can still afford it.