Books go digital

Sick of lugging hefty books with you on vacation? Portable, electronic readers -- with their easy-on-the-eyes displays and ability to carry hundreds of titles without gaining weight -- started to make inroads on their hardback cousins in 2009.

E-book sales brought in $13.9 million in revenue in the third quarter of last year, according to International Digital Publishing Forum, a trade organization. The same time period this year saw $46.5 million in e-book revenue -- a 235 percent spike.

The Amazon Kindle, originally released in November 2007, found some competition this year with the release of the Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble's Nook. Meanwhile, libraries, authors, publishers and Google continued to haggle out the details of a settlement that could give the Internet giant permission to create the world's largest library -- online only.