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SAN JOSE, California: Printed books provide pleasures no device created by an electrical engineer can match. The sweet smell of a brand-new book. The tactile pleasures of turning a page. The reassuring sight on one's bookshelves of personal journeys.

But not one of these explains why books have resisted digitization. That is simpler: Books are portable and easy to read.

Building a portable electronic reader was the easy part; matching the visual quality of ink on paper took longer. But display technology has advanced to the point where the digital page is easy on the eyes, too. At last, an e-reader performs well when placed in page-to-page competition with paper. As a result, the digitization of personal book collections is certain to have its day soon.

Music shows the way. The digitization of personal music collections began only after the arrival of the right combination of software and hardware - iTunes Music Store and the iPod. And as Apple did for music lovers, some company will devise an irresistible combination of software and hardware for book buyers. That company may be Amazon.

Amazon's first iteration of an electronic book reader is the Kindle. Introduced in November, it weighs about 10 ounces, or little more than one-quarter of a kilogram, holds more than 200 full-length books and can display newspapers, magazines and blogs. It uses E Ink technology, developed by the company of that name, which produces sharply defined text yet draws power only when a page is changed, not as it is displayed.

Sony uses E Ink in its e-book Reader, which it introduced in 2006, but the Kindle has a feature that neither Sony nor many e-reader predecessors ever possessed: Books and other content can be loaded wirelessly, from just about anywhere in the United States, using the high-speed EVDO network from Sprint.

This may turn out to be a memorable day in the history of convenience - our age's equivalent of that magical moment that FedEx introduced next-day delivery and people asked, "How was life possible before this?"

The Kindle is expensive - $399 - but it sold out in just six hours after its debut Nov. 19. Since then, supplies have consistently lagged behind demand and there is still a waiting list.

Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, has nothing to fear from the Kindle. No one would regard it as competition for the iPod. It displays text in four exciting shades of gray, and it does that one thing very well. And it can do a few other things: For instance, it has a headphone jack and can play MP3 files. But it is not well-suited to navigating a large collection of music tracks.

When Jobs was asked two weeks ago at the Macworld Expo what he thought of the Kindle, he heaped scorn on the book industry. "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don't read anymore," he said. "Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year."

To Jobs, this statistic dooms everyone in the book business to inevitable failure.

Only the business is not as ghostly as Jobs suggests. In 2008, book publishing will bring in about $15 billion in revenue in the United States, according to the Book Industry Study Group, a trade association.

One can only wonder why, by the Study Group's estimate, 408 million books will be bought this year if no one reads anymore?

A survey conducted in August 2007 by Ipsos Public Affairs for The Associated Press found that 27 percent of Americans had not read a book in the previous year. Happily, however, the same share - 27 percent - had read 15 or more books.

In fact, when we exclude Americans who had not read a single book in that year, the average number of books read was 20; 8 percent read 51 books or more. In other words, a sizable minority does not read, but they are balanced somewhat by those who read a lot.

If a piece of the book industry's $15 billion seems too paltry for Jobs to bother with, he is forgetting that Apple reached its current size only recently. Last week, Apple reported that it had posted revenue of $9.6 billion in the quarter that spanned October to December 2007, its best quarter ever, after $24 billion in revenue in the 2007 fiscal year, which ended in September.

But as recently as 2001, before the iPhone and the iPod, Apple was a niche computer company without a mass market hit. It was badly hurt by the 2001 recession and reported revenue of only $5.3 billion for the year. This is, by coincidence, almost exactly what Barnes & Noble reported in revenue for its 2007 fiscal year. In neither case did the company owners look at that number, decide to chain the doors permanently shut and call it quits.