How much of my life has been spent ploughing through essential tomes when I could have been reading fun stuff?

INNOVATION:The new generation of e-readers may do for books and magazines what the iPod did for albums, stripping away the stuff we don't want, writes RICHARD GILLIS

ON THE train the other day, I watched as the man opposite read a book on his iPhone for the entire two-hour journey. This became apparent only when he was interrupted by a caller and revealed to them the book's title: White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga.

This is a first, for me anyway; it felt like a "where were you when?" moment, which made me feel a bit sad for the end of books. I'd assumed that electronic readers, like Amazon's Kindle, would come and go, and not stick around.

Apple's Steve Jobs, for one, has dismissed the idea of e-book readers as the next iPods on the basis that "people don't read any more". But Amazon, which has launched the Kindle2 handheld reader ($356), has okayed an iPhone app, partly in the hope that the experience will make us want to fork out for their own, more expensive, product.

Other such apps are growing up around the iPhone, most notably Stanza and Shortcovers, allowing Kindle to move from its current market of approximately 500,000 device-users to access the iPhone's 13 million-plus owners - in the US alone. And, by allowing collaboration with other tech providers, Amazon could become an iTunes for books - but one that's not tied to any particular player, which makes a great deal of sense for them but may also change the way books are consumed and written.

I've often wondered how my reading habits would change if people couldn't see the cover; how much of my life has been spent ploughing through boring but "essential" tomes when I could have been reading the fun but unworthy stuff.

The other probable impact of the Kindle is on the length of books. In my job, I get to review tonnes of new issues, some good, some appalling. But, regardless of their quality, one feature many share is that they are far, far too long. Business books suffer from this more than most. The reason is that many start life as a magazine or newspaper feature, but then get blown up to book size, so the publishers have something big enough to fit between two hard covers.

Take for example The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine in the US. The first 100 pages of The Long Tail isbrilliant, as good an insight in to the post-internet world as you'll find, delving into the commercial implications of unlimited consumer choice. It was based on an idea Anderson first wrote about in a feature in his own magazine. But then there's loads of other stuff with graphs (the economics bit), which is the same idea applied in different ways to different markets.

In Freakonomics, economic theory is used to explain peculiar things. Most memorable is the story of the New York crime rate which fell by 50 per cent in five years in the late 1990s.

This phenomenon was not, the book says, down to police tactics, but to the legalisation of abortion in 1973, which meant that there were fewer people of the right age around to commit crime in New York in 1999. Fantastic stuff. But many of the other examples in the book are less compelling and are in there to get the thing up to 200 pages.

But with Kindle, there are no hard covers, so no need to overwrite. As a result, we are entering the era of the 50-page book, one that stops when the story stops. At the other end of the spectrum, this could also be good news for those of us who love magazines. I read the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Economistand other high-end publications, which I leave strategically around the house whenever we have people over.

The New Yorker, which is the home of Malcolm Gladwell and many other brilliant writers, gives authors the space to write - at length - on a broad range of topics. But the number of features I read, compared to those I pay for, is tiny ( Book idea: The Read to Glance Ratio: How Magazine Publishers Fooled the World, available at cut-price retailers shortly) but I could be persuaded to make a micro payment for a selected feature. How much for say, The Ketchup Conundrumby Malcolm Gladwell, from the New Yorker, September 2004, (about why there are many different flavoured mustards, but only one ketchup - far more interesting than it sounds when written down like that)?

Follow this on a stage and, despite Jobs's misgivings, the new generation of e-readers may do for books and magazines what the iPod did for albums, stripping away the stuff we don't want to leave us with just the hits.

Which is great for Malcolm Gladwell, but what about the poor suckers who write the stuff we don't want? What happens to them? Watch this space.