Jeff Bezos, the man who reinvented the way the world buys books with Amazon.com, has started a new firestorm of publishing controversy this week, releasing the latest in a series of electronic gadgets which, by design, could render the books we hold, read, linger over, revist, catalogue and collect — all but obsolete.

Others have tread into these electronic waters, most notably Sony with its Reader, a ice I’ve briefly sampled but couldn’t get too excited about. The Reader seemed clunky and too complicated, lacking both the tactile experience of cracking open the pages of a book and featuring a screen that required some tinkering to be legible. And although I have grown weary of toting a very heavy bag of reading material on every flight and jamming books and magazines in my handbag to kill any potential downtime, I found that I couldn’t like the Reader even though logic told me I should. And the bottom line is, when you don’t like something, you probably won’t use it.

It seems that a trio of improvements to the idea of virtual book are making the Kindle a big story — so big, in fact, that Newsweek oted a cover story to it. The Kindle allows the download of books directly to the ice without a stop at a computer. It allows one to change the the size of the font, something the over-40 crowd struggling with the decision to use reading glasses will no doubt appreciate, and it packs 30 hours of battery life. Weighing in at less than a pound, there can be no doubt that it will lighten everyone’s luggage which is no small feat in a day when passing through airport security makes most people wish they could leave everything they own at home to avoid the hassles of packing and unpacking while lines of fellow passengers sigh around you.

The advantages are clearly there, but will the reader follow? Will it, as Bezos has said, “change the way readers read, writers write and publishers publish.”?

While the purist in me refuses to imagine a world without physical books, I can’t help but think of my children and the entire generation to which they belong, who have grown up in a world not only digital, but instant and on demand. The other night we dug out an old VHS holiday movie and my youngest had to have the concept of “rewind” explained. Many of us will recall gathering around the television set (minus remote control) to watch those classic movies which aired once a year and were major social events. We can also remember when computers filled not desks but rooms, 8-track tapes were “really cool” and playing with friends involved no screens but things like bikes and board games. Given that all that, is it really so hard to believe that a world without physical books is possible? Again, the purist moans, but the hard eyed realist who barely moves to a different room in the house without her blackberry isn’t so sure.

Herb Schaffner, the publisher of McGraw Hill and someone savvy and excited about the digital potential of the written word recently said me, “books are the original portable entertainment ice.” Clearly, he’s right. But Jeff Bezos just may be the man to change the form of those books forever.