Okay all you bookworms, you knew this was coming. The music men did it almost a decade ago, and the moviewallahs didn’t hesitate to follow suit either. So how long did you think it would take before publishers the world over broke the written word down to strings of hypertext and sent it to cyberspace, changing the way books were read forever?

Not long, obviously. With each passing day, more and more publishers are hopping onto the electronic bandwagon in a bid to lure those who don’t have either the time or the inclination to look away from their gadgets.

India has woken up relatively late to the trend. Last month Penguin India — Asia’s biggest English language publisher — tied up with Mobifusion, a global developer, publisher and distributor of mobile technology, to distribute three bestsellers from its catalogue through mobile phones.

Select chapters and passages from these books — The Joy in Loving: A Guide to Daily Living with Mother Teresa, The Path to Tranquillity by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and The Book of Prayer—will now be available to subscribers through cellular platforms. The rate of subscription? A mere Rs 1-2 a day for passages to be sent out daily.

Experts in the industry say this is only the beginning, and that it’s only a matter of time before e-books start giving printed books a run for their money. Penguin, on its part, says there’s much more to come, and that several e-books will soon be added to its digital list. “We see mobile technology as a hugely exciting global opportunity, not just as a means of widening access to our content but also as a way to meet the growing consumer demand for personalised content and services,” says Genevieve Shore, global digital director, Penguin.

The reasons for this change are easy to figure out. First, experts say that reading habits in today’s society are markedly different from those of the past. People are now more given to reading in bits and pieces rather than going through the entire length of a book at one go.

“Our patented mPublishing Technology is being used by publishers to adapt content into ‘snack’ experiences, so as to entertain and inform cell phone users,” says Prashant Gupta, managing director of Mobifusion, the company that has tied up with Penguin. “In India, our service will cater to Airtel, Vodafone Essar, BSNL, Idea and Spice users, through downloadable clients, interactive WAP portals and messaging services.”

Second, some claim that e-books will soon become a more viable alternative to printed books. Some facts and figures thrown up at the Tools of Change conference — hosted by ’Reilly Media, an American firm specialising in innovative publishing — in New York in February seemed to suggest that the industry is steadily inching in that direction.

The global digital publishing industry is currently worth $430 billion. In 2007, five of the top 10 global bestsellers were originally written for distribution through mobile phones. Romance is supposedly a growing genre in e-books, an observation that prompted Harlequin, the publishers of the Mills & Boon series, to tie up with mobile and audio content providers.

Also, the world now has personal electronic gadgets such as the Kindle and the Mobipocket Reader, which are meant to read e-books with much the same dedication as mobile phones are used to make phone calls. Upon paying a subscription fee, readers can use these gadgets to download from the Internet select chapters or sections from their favourite books, which they can read and perhaps store for future reference. What is more, by 2020 personal gadgets the size of an iPod will be able to store all material ever published in the world.

Clearly, these advancements will allow future readers to stock up on their favourite e-books which can be read anytime, anywhere. “It would do to literature pretty much what Napster once did, and the iPod has now done, to music,” says Ravi Singh, president and CEO of MPS Technologies, a part of the Macmillan group and global leaders in e-content services.

“What’s more, it might lead to dwindling book sales, just like off-the-shelves purchases of CDs went down with the digitisation of music,” adds Singh. “Research indicates that of some 300 million books ever printed, less than five million are currently online. There’s a lot of business potential here.”

Finally, e-books make business sense for the publishers. An expert points out that some publishers make as little as 37 per cent on the printed cover price of books, after paying overhead expenses such as royalties and store discounts. “E-books can increase their profits largely, since business discounts, commissions, printing costs and overhead expenses would then come down considerably,” he says.

Still, many in the publishing industry think that it’s too early to bid conventional books farewell. “The printed book will stay, for despite estimations there’s no concrete evidence that conventional readership is going down,” says Hemali Sodhi, head, marketing and promotions, Penguin India. “The exploration of new media only attempts to increase readership, rather than replace it.”

P.M. Sukumar, CEO, HarperCollins India, agrees. “While I don’t see digital books ever replacing conventional books, they will definitely facilitate reaching out to a wider readership,” he says. He underlines the technological barriers in using platforms such as mobile services. Mobiles, for example, are only suited to distributing ‘dip-in-anywhere’ books, such as living guides, thoughts of the day or prayers. ‘Start-to-finish’ books wouldn’t work on a mobile platform, says Sukumar, since it’s not possible to read hundreds of pages of text on a mobile screen. “A palm reader like Kindle would be a lot better for that,” he says.

In 10 years’ time, when you curl up in bed on a sunny winter afternoon with your favourite Jeffrey Archer novel, will you be staring into a tiny LCD screen instead of a printed page? But what if you’ve accidentally dropped your reading gadget on the floor and seen your digital library come apart in chips? So don’t throw away your books. Not yet.