(FORTUNE Magazine) – Books follow me home. When I walk through a store, they seek me out, turning up later on my shelves like foundlings. That's a problem because, like most New York apartments, mine isn't quite big enough. I'm also easily bored and usually read several books at a time, even when traveling, which makes for heavy luggage. So not long ago I bought an electronic book, or e-book, in hopes that portable paperless publishing might somehow help me find room for what I'm reading or have read. What I bought wasn't a digital tome but a book-like computer that displays text that I can download from various sources. In fact, I bought two: a Rocket eBook from NuvoMedia and a Softbook from Softbook Press.

After a few weeks of virtual page-turning, I can tell you I'm impressed with the advances electronic print has made in recent months. I doubt that e-books will ever displace most of my old-fashioned "p-books" or stop me from buying new ones, but high-tech text has already begun to supplant some of those Modern Library classics I've been packing along in every move since my undergraduate days.

Only about 3,000 e-titles are for sale, but with a modest effort you can create quite a library--often for free--now that both NuvoMedia and Softbook have made their book-creation software available at no cost. Much of what used to be known as the canon of Western civilization is floating around cyberspace, ready to be transformed into an electronic book by anyone willing to download and do a little reformatting. From Sophocles and Shakespeare to Mark Twain and Machiavelli--it's all out there on the Internet. The most comprehensive free source, the On-Line Books Page (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books) at the University of Pennsylvania, offers more than 10,000 titles.

Electronic book devices--let's call them "readers"--have been on the market for more than a year, and are hardly bestsellers. Consumers have been unwilling to spend a few hundred dollars for a reader when e-books are scarce, and publishers haven't wanted to digitize their holdings for a meager audience of the gadget-infatuated. The next chapters, however, will be different. Two harbingers: The influential New York Times Book Review recently published a favorable essay about e-books and then carried a full-page advertisement for an electronic reader a week later.

Traditional publishers are beginning to convert their backlists. New companies such as NetLibrary (www.netlibrary.com) of Boulder, Colo., and Online Originals (www.onlineoriginals.com) of London are springing up to publish solely for the digital market. Fatbrain (www.fatbrain.com) has started a service that enables authors to publish e-books themselves, set their own prices, and keep half the profits. Such new companies as Infinite Ink (www.infiniteink.com) of Portland, Ore.; MesaView (www.mesaview.com) of Nashua, N.H.; Overdrive Systems (www.overdrive.com) of Cleveland; and Versaware (www.versaware.com) of New York help publishers convert text into e-books. Adobe Systems and Xerox entered the business recently, and Microsoft says it's following soon.

Getting book-readers into the hands of enough readers of books, however, remains a problem, one that's common in consumer electronics--a field in which brand recognition, customer confidence, and distribution channels are more important to success than product innovation. Persuading consumers to buy a new category of device has proven almost impossible without support from the likes of Matsushita, Philips, and Sony.

To sidestep that obstacle, some companies are focusing on providing paperless works for devices that many people already own, such as notebook computers and handheld organizers. For example, Peanut Press (www.peanutpress.com), a startup in Wayland, Mass., is publishing e-text for devices running the Palm Computer and Microsoft Windows CE operating systems. For computers that run Microsoft's Windows operating system, Glassbook (www.glassbook.com) in Waltham, Mass., uses Adobe's PDF technology to serve up works that look very much like real books. The approach might work. After all, millions of us already scroll through text on our computer screens. We may call it searching, browsing, or simply working, but it's reading, all the same.

Personally, I find that reading on a notebook computer or a handheld organizer doesn't seem much like reading, although PDF produces type and layout that are far more pleasing than the HTML technology on which NuvoMedia and Softbook rely. So I'm pulling for the latter two, hoping that Gemstar International Group, which recently agreed to acquire both companies, can provide the boost they need. Gemstar, as you may recall, brought us VCR Plus, the remote gadget that uses those little numbers in the newspaper television schedule to make programming a VCR possible for adults. The technology is humdrum; Gemstar's feat was in persuading most newspapers to publish the programming numbers (and to pay for the privilege). More recently it has been able to persuade major consumer electronics manufacturers to license its VCR Plus and other technologies for program selection. Those connections place Gemstar in a position to set the standards and finance the low-cost, high-volume manufacturing that the young electronic-book industry needs to become widely accepted in the next three to five years.

Then the only requirement for success will be for e-book companies to master the rudiments of retailing. In December, I tried to buy a Rocket eBook from a NuvoMedia representative who was stationed in a Manhattan Barnes & Noble. She, it turned out, was only promoting the product, not selling it. She sent me to the cashier, who, in turn, called the store manager, who said the store had none and wasn't expecting any. After telephoning three other Barnes & Noble outlets in the city, I finally located one eBook, thanks to a diligent clerk, who told me he'd have to put me on hold. "I have to check the safe," he explained. "That's where we keep them."

RICHARD A. SHAFFER is founder of Technologic Partners, an information company focused on emerging technology. Except as noted, Shaffer has no financial interest in the companies mentioned. You can visit his Website at www.technologicpartners.com or send comments to shaffer@technologicp.com.