Ebooks. Not again...

Yes, again. But this time, there's a difference.

A difference which — at first — may not seem very important. You see, up until recently, say the last year or so, electronic displays were seriously hampered. They were bulky, needed lots of power for backlighting and switching thousands of pixels on and off all the time, their resolution was — to be honest — pitiful for the crisp rendering of well formed letters and words.

All of these problems have now been solved by the invention of E Ink. Allowing a resolution of around 160 pixels per inch, it is high enough to render text with enough definition to allow swift reading without the squint of working out whether you're looking at 'rn' or 'm'. You can work it out with close scrutiny, but when you're reading and don't want the technology to get in the way, a higher resolution is the only answer.

Also, the new technology doesn't need power to maintain an image, only to change it. A practical application of this in an ebook device means that it is only powered for a fraction of a second as you 'turn the page'. Once the new page has been rendered, the device can effectively power off until the next page.

The technology inherently shuns the need for a backlight, being an entirely reflective medium. This means that reading in bright, direct sunlight is most preferable whereas with TFT or similar technologies, bright sunlight drowns out the pitifully dim screen. Reading by artificial light will be just as easy as with a book.

So where does this leave us? With a choice, of course.

Sony's Reader, which sells for around $300-$350, depending on which review you see, looks quite sleek and certainly seems slim and small enough to fit in an inside pocket or a bag. Amazon's Kindle at $399 is a bit more expensive, but has the advantage of an effectively free cellular broadband connection, allowing you to download books wherever you are without having to cable connect to a PC as with the Sony device.

Myself, I'm sure that within a year, we'll see the kind of diverse and cheaper market that we now have with MP3 players.

Sure, you can buy the original branded iPod in various incarnations for anything up to £150, maybe more, but £30 will get you a cheap alternative that works, albeit with fewer features.

My money's on the wait.