The digital book got off to a slow start, but it looks like its time is finally arriving. Even the most jaded anti-digital book lover has to admit it.

You can't stop progress, as they say. If you create a new technology, chances are it will eventually come into widespread use and render the pre-existing technologies obsolete - fuel-injection engines come to mind.

But the digital book was always a harder sell, and not just amongst us bibliophiles, who love everything about the tangible, good old-fashioned book - from the dust-jacket to the index, from the special aroma of fresh-cut pages (remember when you had to cut pages with a "book-knife?) to the other-worldly soulful feeling of an antique piece of incunabula (very old books indeed).

This writer counts himself among the ranks of book lovers who could not imagine substituting a Kindle digital reader for that rare, hard-cover first edition of "STP - On Tour With The Rolling Stones: 1972."

I am also a great patron of bookstores and libraries, and can imagine no better half hour of relaxation than browsing through the shelves, seeing what's on offer, reaching for my library card or whatever cash I dare spend to augment my personal library (of which I am extremely vain).

But my moment of digital epiphany came only recently, when trying to read "Anna Karenina" while eating a plate of spaghetti - two efforts which when combined mean they both go badly.

"A Kindle would be really, really handy right now," I said to myself as I lost my place yet again, and dribbled sauce over my shirtfront, yet again.

There are lots of other benefits - take a library in your suitcase while traveling, starting the next volume in a series right after finishing the first, checking out those classics, hot best-sellers or obscure hard to find works that you've heard about. And the digital marketplace is catching up to allow you to do all that. And for hard-core, hard-cover bibliophiles, you can always order the paper books anyway. A home library will always be a cool, useful and much-loved thing.

The technology is starting to catch on here at Cranbrook. The Cranbrook Public Library is offering new eBook options. In fact, the library will present an introduction to eBook reading Tuesday, Jan. 18, at 4 p.m in the Manual Training School, when you can learn about the benefits and drawbacks.

Perhaps most importantly, the rise of this new digital literacy, so to speak, is being driven by economics. Bibliophiles generally don't stint the price of a new book, but cash-strapped school boards around the world are considering the digital option for textbooks for students. The Toronto District School Board, for example, is looking at moving to digital textbooks this year, a move they say could save the district $100 million over the next decade.And then there is the much-lamented cost of university textbooks, with all its "Broken Market" economics, which tends to bankrupt students by the second week of September. A digital textbook revolution in this case would be to the detriment only of the handful of major textbook publishers.

Thus the communications revolution continues to enhance our lives. And as an added plus, maybe it will make that copy of "STP" even more collectible.