The first is that people can’t be bothered to work it out or to pay. The horrible success of the Blackberry shows that people will read pages and pages of badly rendered ASCII if you force it into their coat pockets. If they are prepared to do that, they ought to be reading offline internet channels on AvantGo or feeds on RSS, but of course non-geeks don’t know about that stuff.

The iPod offered the option to store your entire music collection in a coat pocket, but this impressive-sounding feature wasn’t truly what drove the mass market sales, for most people it came about almost by accident as they bought the small pretty Walkman and then had to work out how to put music on it.

So I agree, iTunes, being something everyone already has and already understands, may well be the way to deliver text content to a wide audience who aren’t interested in finding out how to do it.

The other thing is the devices themselves. It’s true that they don’t currently make reading a pleasant experience, but I don’t think that’s truly about the size of the handheld. If the screen could be made bright enough, and high res enough, to rival print, people would be happy reading on a scrolling device the size of an iPod. And they’d be even happier if flexible ‘electronic paper’ becomes a low-cost manufacturable reality. The screens are the secret.

I for one would love to say goodbye to the book.

But I’m not sure it’s really in publishers’ interests to support this change anyway. Whatever business models, restrictions and add ons are developed, we are ultimately talking about words, the simplest and most easily-shared content of all. Blockbusters like The Da Vinci Code are already illegally downloadable in minutes for free, and that’s at a time when no one really reads electronically. Imagine the amount that would be available if it caught on.

It’s only going to get worse.