The Inevitability of e-Books

John Siracusa has a great piece on the subject here.

To set the table:

The pace of the e-book market over the past decade has been excruciatingly—and yes, you guessed it, unjustly—slow. My frustration is much like that of the Mac users of old. Here’s an awesome, obvious, inevitable idea, seemingly thwarted at every turn by widespread consumer misunderstanding and an endemic lack of will among the big players.

The moment I knew e-books were inevitable was on a plane coming back from PMA. I sat next to an older woman — the archetypal “grandma” if you will — and she was reading what I gleaned was a romance novel using an e-book reader. I asked her about her experience and for 10 minutes she explained how it was the best thing in the world. I felt ashamed when I pulled out my printed book.