In my house, although it is very small, are hundreds of dead trees. Between my husband and me, we had 35 boxes of books last time we moved. As much as we love books, we have been trying to cut back. I now use almost exclusively library books for my fiction reading and he got permission from his school library to keep books he needs for research for extend periods of time so he won’t have to buy them. Even still, we add 2-3 books to our growing library every month.

I know that the books we buy are hard on the environment, but until now I’ve not been convinced about using digital books. They just aren’t as real or easy to read somehow. Even when I’ve read them, I end up printing them off and that’s just as bad. Worse even.

Then I was at Border’s Books the other day and I fell in love. Sony, the pioneers of the iPod’s popularity, have turned their creative forces and engineering capabilities to the book world. While the Reader has several drawbacks, price and limited capabilities among them, it has what every e-book reader I’ve tried to love in the past does not. A Paper-like reading screen. Somehow the magic makers at Sony have created a screen that doesn’t hurt the eyes after long reading in the same way that a computer screen or even a Palm screen will. No straining, just reading.

Sony’s Reader has been out for a while, but it is an uphill battle for it to take off. Books are something that come with built-in interfaces and they are easy to understand, carry and use. The format has worked for hundreds of years. Many reviews that I’ve read in my efforts to determine whether to plunk down around $300 for one of these beauties have been overtly negative, not just to Sony’s Reader but to the concept in general. I think that the Reader will take off in time, remember it took a while for MP3 players to become common to everyone’s ears and the book (as opposed to the scroll) took even loner to become popular. Electronic book readers are headed in the right direction. Even if I don’t give in and buy a Reader, I’m excited to see that page-quality reading screens are a possibility.