Pull a volume off your bookshelf and hold it next to the computer in your home or office. As a work of technology, the 2,000-year-old, paper-and-ink book is still tough to beat. It's portable and doesn't require electricity. It never crashes or breaks down. And it's impervious to hackers, viruses and bugs- unless you count bookworms.

Over the centuries, books have been made with materials ranging from stone to parchment to leather to paper. But now there's a new medium - silicon.

This month the first of several electronic books is expected to hit the market. While these new "e-books" use state-of-the-art technology, much of the digital magic has gone into making them seem comfortably familiar. About the size and weight of a college textbook, they display black text on a white liquid crystal background. You can even scribble in their electronic margins or digitally dog-ear a page.

But these books are like none you've ever read. The e-book will cost about 60 times as much as the average paperback - but it will hold the equivalent of a bookshelf full of information downloaded from online book stores.

For that reason, e-book makers think they'll be ideal for students, doctors, corporate executives or anyone who regularly needs to lug around lots of reading or reference material.

Almost no one in the industry believes that paper books will go the way of the stone tablet any time soon - most readers still relish the feel of a book in their hands. But the arrival of the e-book could change the way many books are read, written and published - a shakeup under way thanks to the Internet.

E-books could allow publishers to sell more copies of their titles - much the way audio books do - while eliminating some of the money they pay to print books, warehouse them and handle returns. Some large book retailers and publishing houses are signing deals with fledgling e-book makers.

"Remember: There's no paper on 'Star Trek,' " says Jim Sachs, chief executive of SoftBook Press Inc., a Menlo Park, Calif. firm that plans to launch its leather-bound electronic SoftBook this month.

The digital age is changing our reading habits. Cyberspace is quickly becoming a giant bookshelf, with the Starr report as the latest must-read. Long before that, it was possible to find online the complete works of great writers. Michael Hart, director of the venerable Project Gutenberg, is responsible for translating many literary classics into digital form. In 1971, a few years after the birth of the Internet, Hart began typing books on a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer at the University of Illinois. His goal: to create an electronic library containing every book in the public domain.

"That way, literally for the price of a decent bookshelf you can buy a disk drive and create a library that rivals the Library of Congress," he says.

In the beginning, Hart typed all the books and documents into the computer himself. The first document to go online was the Declaration of Independence. Today Gutenberg's online repository holds about 1,500 books - with about three dozen added each month. Most were entered by volunteers around the globe, and Hart says his digital editions are well-thumbed.

"People read them from end to end, do homework with them, book reports, research - everything you or I would do with a normal book," he says.

But Hart acknowledges that reading on a computer is not always comfortable or convenient. Unless you own a laptop, you can't cart a PC into the bathroom or onto a plane. That's why - until the e-books introduced this fall become widespread - some people are latching onto other digital tools to read on the road. Perhaps the most surprising: digital organizers like the Palm Pilot.

"A paperback is cumbersome to carry around, but my Pilot's hanging on my belt anyway," says Michael Heinz, a 33-year-old from Wayne, Pa., who scrolls through classic science-fiction novels by H.G Wells and others "to keep busy during otherwise pointless meetings."

Heinz isn't alone. Although the Pilot's liquid crystal display screen is about the size of a Saltine cracker, many of the 1.6 million Pilot owners are using them not only to keep appointments and phone numbers, but also to while away the workday with a good read.

"It would be untruthful of me to say that there weren't differences between text on paper and the Pilot's screen. But you get used to it," says John Swain, a 35-year-old production director at a visual effects company in New York City who reads books on his Pilot while sitting in Manhattan gridlock or outside a client's office.

Swain also runs the Lending Library, one of dozens of free book repositories for the Palm Pilot on the Web. Swain's site contains more than 345 novels and each month visitors download more than 20,000 copies. The most popular? "Believe it or not, it's 'Moby Dick,' " he marvels.

Some would-be authors are taking advantage of the Internet-coupled devices such the Palm Pilot to break into the literary world. Kristen Brennan, 30, of Berkeley, Calif., wrote her full-length novel "Buffalo Girls" and published it online last year.

Since then, Brennan says she's received calls from the William Morris Agency about film rights to the novel and interest from children's publishing giant Scholastic about setting the story of teen-age angst into type.

"Most first-time authors see about 5,000 copies of their book printed, and nobody reads them," says Brennan. "I've had about 40,000 downloads. I'm amazed that all unpublished writers don't try to do this."

Finally, on the high-tech frontier, scientists are turning the e-book paradigm on its head. Instead of turning computers into books, they want to turn books into computers.

"What is the barrier to the electronic book? People don't want to read books on their TVs or computer screen," says Russ Wilcox, director of business development at E-Ink of Cambridge, Mass. "Every time I get a 20-or 30-page business document, I print it out. It's just a lot easier to read when it's ink on paper."

E-Ink is one one of several companies racing to develop an exotic technology called "electronic ink." The "ink" consists of millions of capsules, so small that the period at the end of this sentence could hold more than 30 of them. Each capsule, in turn, contains white, electrically charged particles floating in a dark liquid.

Using an electrical current, E-Ink engineers cause the white particles to clump at the top or bottom of each microcapsule, making it appear white or black. To make an electronic book, the engineers hope to coat a paper-like sheet with the microcapsules. By manipulating the electricity flow, E-ink engineers say they could form letters and words, giving the impression of a printed page.

An electronic book made with E-Ink is still several years away, says Wilcox. But it could offer several advantages over present-day liquid crystal displays. For example, its resolution would be as crisp as real paper. It could bend and fold like paper. It would also require little power, since electricity is only needed to form the letters, not hold them in place.

Wilcox says the company eventually wants to marry electronic book technology with wireless broadcasts to create an "electronic newspaper" that would sit on your coffee table and have the day's headlines beamed to it each morning.

SoftBook Press Inc.: www.softbook.com

NuvoMedia Inc.: www.nuvomedia.com

Project Gutenberg: www.gutenberg.net

Palm Pilot Lending Library: www.macduff.net

E-Ink Corp: www.eink.com

Pub Date: 10/05/98