Let me stick my neck out and say that I don't believe there will be good electronic bookreaders for a very long time. Not because the technology doesn't exist, but because the definition of good is a movable feast.

From a user's point of view a good bookreader should cost no more than a book and should be usable under all conditions that you can use a book. If it costs significantly more than a hardback book, it will be perceived as too expensive by a very large subset of readers (possibly a majority). If it breaks when you drop it, or expose it to moisture, it will be seen as too fragile. It must also have a very long battery life -- preferably of the same order as a solar-powered calculator (i.e. effectively infinite: if it's light enough to read the reader should have enough power to operate). Current PDAs combine the two drawbacks (fragile and expensive) with a third: poor quality displays, and although digital paper seems likely to solve the latter in the long run I expect DP display tech to develop in the direction of colour and high resolution before it develops in the direction of low cost.

There's a reason for this, of course. Book readers are developed by the electronics industry, not the publishing industry. The electronics companies concerned want to make profits, and it's harder to make a profit off a $30 item than a $300 one. This is why PCs tend to get more powerful rather than getting cheaper. There is a long-term downward pressure on overall costs, but in the 20 years it has taken the cost of a typical home PC to fall by 70%, its power has risen by several orders of magnitude.

There's a wildcard in this equation: what if people take to reading books on their phones, which have high resolution colour displays and which they accept the price of because it serves a perceived valuable other purpose? But the problem with that option is that the trend in phones for the past decade has been towards making them more compact. A phone that doubles as an ebook reader must of necessity be large enough to read comfortably (presumably without scrolling every two seconds). So the requirements of an ebook reader seem to be at odds with the requirements of a mobile phone, which rules out that option for now.

None of this invalidates the fact that the economics of ebooks may well have a huge impact on the way writers work in the long term. But I suspect it will take more than one, and possibly more than three, decades before this becomes a major issue.

Confession: I read ebooks on my Palm Tungsten T3. But I'm virtually the only person I know who does so -- most people I ask take one look at it and wince.