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But e-books won’t stay on the periphery of book publishing much longer. E-book hardware is on the verge of going mainstream. More dedicated e-readers are coming, with ever larger screens. So, too, are computer tablets that can serve as giant e-readers, and hardware that will not be very hard at all: a thin display flexible enough to roll up into a tube.

With the new devices in hand, will book buyers avert their eyes from the free copies only a few clicks away that have been uploaded without the copyright holder’s permission? Mindful of what happened to the music industry at a similar transitional juncture, book publishers are about to discover whether their industry is different enough to be spared a similarly dismal fate.

Total e-book sales, though up considerably this year, remained small, at $81.5 million, or 1.6 percent of total book sales through July.

For example, they want to be online “books,” “editions,” “encyclopedias,” “bookshelves,” “libraries,” “archives,” “repositories” or (a newer metaphor) “portals.” Such structures are supposed to make intuitive the relation between individual documents and other documents. But, frankly, many of those structures didn’t work too well even in the golden age of print. (Show me one person who has made a serendipitous discovery while wandering the library stacks, and I will show you a thousand whose eyes glazed over at the sheer anomie, inefficiency, and meaninglessness of it all.) They especially don’t work well now when stretched to describe online technologies that actually behave nothing like a book, edition, library and so on. My group thinks that Web 2.0 offers a different kind of metaphor: not a containing structure but a social experience. Reading environments should not be books or libraries. They should be like the historical coffeehouses, taverns and pubs where one shifts flexibly between focused and collective reading — much like opening a newspaper and debating it in a more socially networked version of the current New York Times Room for Debate. The future of peripheral attention is social networking, and the trick is to harness such attention — some call it distraction — well.

Electronic reading has become progressively easier as computer screens have improved and readers have grown accustomed to using them. Still, people read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 percent. Fifteen or 20 years ago, electronic reading also impaired comprehension compared to paper, but those differences have faded in recent studies.

Each young reader has to fashion an entirely new “reading circuit” afresh every time. There is no one neat circuit just waiting to unfold. This means that the circuit can become more or less developed depending on the particulars of the learner: e.g., instruction, culture, motivation, educational opportunity. Equally interesting, this tabula rasa circuit is shaped by the particular requirements of the writing system: for example, Chinese reading circuits require more visual memory than alphabets. This “open architecture” of the reading circuit makes the young reader’s developing circuit malleable to what the medium (e.g., digital online reading, book, etc) emphasizes.

Electronic “is going to be the center of the universe,” said Ms. Friedman, a flamboyant and relentless booster of authors during her four-decade career in New York publishing. “We really think that what we’re going to do is to help transform the industry, which is built on models that we all know are broken.”

Although she provided few specifics, Ms. Friedman said Open Road would use a new proprietary online marketing platform to promote backlist titles on blogs, Twitter and social networking sites.

Because many authors signed print contracts before the growing world of e-books was contemplated, many older works are not currently available in official e-book form. Ms. Friedman has secured a contract to publish Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” in an e-book edition and is negotiating with the estate of Michael Crichton for the e-book rights to several titles.

A significant advantage of OLED displays over traditional liquid crystal displays (LCDs) is that OLEDs do not require a backlight to function. Thus, they can display deep black levels, draw far less power, and can be much thinner and lighter than an LCD panel. OLED displays also naturally achieve much higher contrast ratio than LCD monitors

The biggest technical problem for OLEDs is the limited lifetime of the organic materials.[44] In particular, blue OLEDs historically have had a lifetime of around 14,000 hours (five years at 8 hours a day) when used for flat-panel displays, which is lower than the typical lifetime of LCD, LED or PDP technology—each currently rated for about 60,000 hours, depending on manufacturer and model. However, some manufacturers of OLED displays claim to have come up with a way to solve this problem with a new technology to increase the lifespan of OLED displays, pushing their expected life past that of LCD displays.[45] A metal membrane helps deliver light from polymers in the substrate throughout the glass surface more efficiently than current OLEDs. The result is the same picture quality with half the brightness and a doubling of the screen's expected life.[46] In 2007, experimental OLEDs were created which can sustain 400 cd/m² of luminance for over 198,000 hours for green OLEDs and 62,000 hours for blue OLEDs.[47] Additionally, as consequence of the fact that light emitting components of different colors have different lifetimes, it's obvious that the quality of a color picture would degrade over time since emission of each color reduces by a different amount. At some point color picture quality would become unacceptable, so overall display lifetime could be even worse than lifetime of separate components because many uses are putting certain requirements on picture quality. This can be partially avoided by adjusting color balance but this may require advanced control circuits and interaction with user, which is unacceptable for some uses. The intrusion of water into displays can damage or destroy the organic materials. Therefore, improved sealing processes are important for practical manufacturing and may limit the longevity of more flexible displays.[48]