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For some years, an amusing "advertisement" for a new technology called the BOOK circulated on the Web. You've read it: It's the one that painstakingly lists all the advantages of the Bio-Optic Organized Knowledge device, which is "powerful enough to hold as much as a CD-ROM" and is "constructed of sequentially numbered sheets of paper (recyclable), each capable of holding thousands of bits of information." I have always found this satire to be clever -- particularly the parts that stress the "browse" function of the BOOK (". . . allows instant movement to any sheet, forward or backward").

It's funny because nobody has yet found a better delivery system for words than bound printed paper. The book is a perfectly designed object, the product of hundreds of years of refinements. Like the wine bottle (the perfect storage system, the perfect quantity, the most convenient shape), the book has evolved to the point at which no more improvement can be made.

Of course, that's not stopping Sony Corp., which has recently released its new, improved e-book Reader, a hand-held electronic device that claims to have a screen that reads exactly like paper, even in bright sunlight. It's around the same size and weight as a slim paperback. The Sony Reader costs $397, which seems a little steep for a book.

But it can hold 80 "average"-length books -- more with a separate memory card -- which certainly saves space. And a European company, iRex, is trumpeting its own e-reader, called the Iliad, which sells for €649, or around $925. This one has Wi-Fi, and a touch-sensitive screen so that you can make notes on what you're reading. It's all pretty cool, and I can see its advantages for those who travel a lot and can't be encumbered with heavy books. It also has great appeal for editors who must haul unbound manuscripts around. It could also save you money, if you want to read the classics, for most canonical works of literature are instantly downloadable at Project Gutenberg and will be wonderfully compatible with such a device.

But I've seen a video demonstration of the Iliad reader in action, and it's painfully slow. It takes seconds to register each command, and even to turn pages. That would quickly grow irritating. And of course the smallest drop of coffee on the buttons is going to gum one of these up, whereas coffee stains on actual books are rather romantic. I wouldn't really want to take a $1,000 piece of technology to the beach. Nor do I want to be restricted in the books that I read to those that are free on Gutenberg or available for sale through (who else?) Sony. The books that are in digital format are still only a tiny fraction of the books available for sale or in libraries. (You would be forever prevented from reading any one of my novels, for example, if you were limited to reading on an e-reader, and that is surely an unforgivable loss.) Yes, all that will change as we grow slowly closer to an entirely digital world, and all the books are slowly scanned. And presumably the price of these things will fall.

But interestingly, a parallel and one might say contradictory technological development is also occurring. An American company called On Demand Books has created a device called the Espresso Book Machine, which will print black-and-white text for a 300-page paperback with a four-colour cover and bind it together in three minutes. The machine, which is not quite perfected and therefore not yet for sale, is the size of a photocopier and will retail for less than $100,000 (U.S.) (they hope). So far, it has mostly been used for self-publishing projects, but the idea is to put it together with e-books, so that if you download a book you can go to your local copy shop or bookstore or library with the file and turn it into a book. And then you won't need one of these $400 e-readers.

This machine might be of use to booksellers who don't want to stock slow-selling items, but who still want to make them available. You go into a bookstore, order a rare book, somebody looks it up on-line, and presto, in three minutes it's real. This would be great for authors too, especially the Canadian ones (like me) who have had their hearts broken by massive returns from the Indigo/Chapters monopoly. It's a more efficient sales system.

And it just goes to show that all the digital technology in the world still ends up in the service of paper.