Ever since that epochally geeky day in 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell shouted "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you," into the first working telephone, it has been commonly assumed that every new invention will render an older one obsolete. (Mr. Bell's gadget wasn't exactly good news for the telegraph.) Nonetheless, exceptions are plentiful: Television was supposed to administer a lethal blow to radio. Videocassettes — and their successors, DVDs — were expected to do the same to Hollywood, which last year sold a record $9.49 billion worth of tickets in the United States alone. These days, bloggers like to consign newspapers and magazines — companies that sell products printed on paper — to history's technological trash heap. The revolution, no doubt, has begun. Just ask a teenager. "Why would you sit there with that heap of paper?" my daughter asked one morning as she watched me plow through The New York Times. "Has anyone ever told you about this new thing called the Internet?"

Now that newspapers are endangered and download is a verb, one has to wonder what will become of those ancient and sacred texts known as books. The forecast is not pretty. Publishing is an industry that the cyberially inclined often refer to as the "dead-tree media." Digital sophisticates see the book fast becoming the province of the kind of technologically impaired snob who insists the only proper way to listen to recorded music is to place a giant piece of vinyl on a revolving machine and scratch it with a needle. After all, electronic ink — a technology that replaces conventional print — has arrived. And so has the Amazon Kindle, the highly publicized $399 digital reader introduced by the company that, since 1994, has done more to place those anachronistic products called books into the hands of people than any publishing house, school, or bookstore.

I like books and rarely get into an elevator or onto a subway without one. (After all, you never know who you are going to be stuck with or for how long.) When I travel, they account for half the bulk of my luggage. So the idea of carrying around a volume the size of a small paperback that can hold dozens of books had an obvious attraction, although it made me feel a bit unfaithful. Still, if Amazon was on board, who was I to try and fend off the future? So a couple of weeks ago, for the first time in my life, I flew across the Atlantic without a single book. No magazines or newspapers either. That's because they were all on the Kindle — two novels, one history of modern classical music, and several documents I had sent to the special e-mail address that comes with the reader. For good measure, I downloaded Denis Johnson's 624-page Tree of Smoke before we left the ground. It took two minutes to surf to Amazon's Kindle site and download the novel over the high-speed wireless network that is available, free, to anyone who buys the device. (Most books cost about $10, and nearly 100,000 are available.)