When I think too much about the pace of change in the modern world, I get dizzy. Yesterday's "big news" in the ebook arena was that Barnes and Noble, a large chain of brick-and-mortar books stores, planned to launch an online ebook store. Note that Barnes and Noble already owns Fictionwise, a pioneer site in ebooks that never attracted the level of notice of Amazon.com. Now B&N have signed a deal with Plastic Logic to hook their as yet unnamed eReader into the B&N ebook store.

At the same time, Amazon is signing a deal with the University of Michigan to make "out of print" books available again. And on the other side of the pond, Blackwells, a UK bookstore chain, also plans to open ebook online store.

Ebooks languished in obscurity for so long, people got used to thinking of them as something for which the concept sounded intriguing but there was no practical use for it. Not any more! Now every day brings a new development. I would say it's a brave new world, to coin a phrase.