The result of all that was that there never was a boom in ebooks to rival the MP3 phenomenon, and now the online video phenomenon. The initial enthusiasm of the publishing industry for the modern medium rapidly deflated, to the point that we can no longer buy current electronic books for our Rocket eBook.

Every time we fire it up –perhaps to re-read one of the ebooks we bought between 2000 and 2003, or one of the Web pages and other documents we can still, fortunately, save to it – we can feel our self-respect shrinking. Is it surprising, then, that we’ve scarcely mentioned electronic books since then?

Given our aversion to pain and humilation, we thought we’d never write about the things again, but a couple of weeks ago, at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, we felt our spirits lifting again, like a giant balloon, dragging all our common sense and caution off the ground.

All it took was for a Sydney literary agent and former US publishing executive, Mary Cunnane, to assure the audience at one event that ebooks were about to re-shape the publishing industry.

Mary had just returned from New York, where she encountered several publishers who convinced her that electronic books were about to reshape the publishing industry in much the same way as the invention of the paperback.

According to Mary, the enthusiasm has been whipped up by the Sony Reader, an e-ink device that has not yet been released in Australia, and judging by our efforts to get any information on them from Sony Australia, is probably not going to hit these shores any time soon.

Bleeding Edge is more interested in a device called the Quokkapad, which has just come out of pre-production. Built by an Adelaide company called Ubiq Technologies Pty Ltd, with the input of an American academic, Professor Richard Bellaver of Ball State University, who has been conducting extensive research on ebooks.

The Quokkapad has an eight-inch colour touch screen with 800x600 resolution that should make ebook experience at least as enjoyable as the paper equivalent. What makes it more attractive than the Sony Reader is that it’s not just an ebook reader.

Powered by a 400MHz MIPS processor with 64MB of ROM and 128MB of flash memory, which can be expanded up to 500MB internally, the Quokkapad is a Linux tablet PC, running version 2.7 of GPE Linux. That means it ships with Web browsing and email, calendar, to do, contact management and notetaking capabilities, in addition to audio playback and image viewing.

The Quokkapad will cost around $500. It’s aimed at the corporate, education and government marketplace, rather than consumers, to take advantage of the fact that large organisation can save millions of dollars a year by distributing their documents on electronic devices, rather than printing them.

But it already includes the ability to handle Mobipocket ebooks, and with Adobe expected to release a Linux version of its Digital Editions ebook software by the end of the year, the Quokkapad looks like a solid contender for something that could justify the enthusiasm of those New York publishers: an affordable, flexible, ebook reader/PDA.

We expect to get hold of one for a review in a couple of weeks. We’re trying very hard not to be enthusiastic.