4. Non-Technical Issues

Which leads to the next problem, a non-technological one: How many gadgets do you want to carry? "You've got a lot of devices competing for little segments of the market," says Goszyk. "You have electronic dictionaries, PDAs, iPods, Blackberries, cell phones, laptops. I have a son who's 19, and he carries 2 things at all times - a cell phone and an iPod. That's it."

There are other non-technology-related reasons why younger people have thumbed their noses at eBooks, some of which have to do with how they have grown up. "I think that young people like to move around online," says Schooley. "They get a little info here and a little info there. They don't stay at once place for a long period of time. So they are used to moving and getting information, and doing what they have to do, and they are done. But that's active involvement. It's not the full text screen and moving down through it."

Goszyk agrees. "[The younger generation] have trained their brains differently. They have been on a computer since they were two years old. So the connections with the brain are going to be different from their grandparents, who are used to reading through a story."

But Bogaty thinks that will change. "I think there's a certain validity to those arguments, but I think people get used to reading electronically, so those types of general arguments tend to go away," he says. "It's similar to what you heard when people dismissed writing a letter electronically, because e-mail messages don't have the personal touch of a hand-written letter. Fifteen years later, well, when was the last time you wrote a letter by hand?"

He also was the only one to say what others may not want to come out and state: kids don't read much. "I suspect, and this is purely my personal guess, that young people just don't read as much as older people," he says. "The current base of readers tends to be older. Kids are listening to music and playing videogames."

But that's also an opportunity, he adds. A compelling eBook reader for kids could open that demographic, just like the iPod did. But it will take a while, around five years, he estimates.

"People read newspapers online. People read magazines online. People do an increasing amount of writing and reading on their computers, and this is a natural extension. I think it would be a weird aberration if it didn't happen," says Bogaty.

Bischoff is of the opinion that demographics will drive the market, and eBooks are likely more appealing to the older generation, who read more for pleasure. "Who reads what content is where it plays out," he says. Aging baby boomers will appreciate the eBook's ability to increase font sizes, thus sparing them that inevitable public marker of age: reading glasses. Academics can take advantage of the eBook's ability to carry multiple books at once.

But winning over kids, just because it's a nifty gadget? That's not the way to approach them. "It's not clear to me that going after teens with eBooks is the right thing for leisure," says Bischoff. "I think it is the right thing for education. I think they would be pretty excited to carry around a thin, reading device rather than 20 pounds of books in their backpacks. So they are not buying [eBook hardware] to read Harry Potter, but they could read Harry Potter on it, too."