How the digital book revolution is changing traditional media forever

The UK's e-book revolution is now on fire. Finally, Amazon's aptly named Kindle is being aggressively marketed on billboards, in magazines and even at a haunt of paper book lovers, the Hay Festival. Then, at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple added its e-book store to the latest version of iTunes.

We've been insulated from the arrival of the e-book revolution, as acquiring e-book rights has slowed Amazon's expansion outside the US. In Germany, where the Kindle store just launched this April, only 25,000 books out of the 650,000 catalogue are German language.

Yet the Kindle's UK catalogue dwarfs any individual high-street bookshop. It already has over 550,000 titles. In the US, where the Kindle has been on sale for three years longer than the UK, Amazon reports that Kindle digital editions now outsell the total of paperback and hardback books combined.

This is a revolution in publishing. But it's just the start. It's common for early revolutionary inventions to mimic their predecessors before breaking free: the design of early cars resembled horse-drawn carriages; 1990s-era mobile phones featured number pads that copied home telephones.

Now, though, the leading mobile phones have touchscreens with barely any buttons and, while early e-books are at present copying print publishing, this will change.

The Kindle will spark a transformation in the nature of the book. It offers any book from its vast catalogue for purchase and download in 60 seconds and enables people to carry hundreds of books on a device the size and weight of a paperback.

This e-book convenience frees authors and publishers from the constraints of printing: books no longer have to conform to physical formats.

This will encourage book lengths to become more flexible and we may see the return of the short story as a popular form. Amazon is experimenting in this area with 'Kindle Singles'.