Deciding what book to read next may not be the only choice you face. You may well have to pick: paper or plastic?

Electronic book readers -- often made with plastic -- are an emerging alternative to the bound word for some readers, especially those who like the convenience when traveling.

The high-tech gadgets are still a novelty, but they appear to be taking hold. Already, reading newspapers on a smart phone isn't such a big deal anymore, so these book readers appear to be the next logical step in how new technology can change our reading experiences.

Driven by sales of the Kindle, the most iconic of the devices, these hand-held book readers are larger than an iPhone and, with adjustable font sizes, can make reading text easier.

Made by Amazon and touted by Oprah Winfrey, the Kindle showed up on several holiday shopping guides and is one of the few products this season that appeared to be recession-proof. Demand for the $359 device has been high, and it is sold out until February.

But the popularity of e-book devices doesn't mean the printed page will soon become extinct.

There's just too much to love about ink-and-paper books.

"There's a certain pleasure in leafing through the pages," says Mary Ann Werner, 54, who bought a Kindle last spring but still loves the heft of a good book. "I don't think the Kindle will replace books in my lifetime."

There are certain types of tomes that Werner still buys in printed form, like a photograph-filled memoir or a travel book with lots of maps.

But for a beach vacation or loading up on books for a plane trip, "there's nothing better" than an electronic book, says Werner, co-founder of independent label Red Beet Records in Nashville, Tenn., and a former vice president and counsel at the Washington Post.

'It will only grow' » At 10.3 ounces and about the size of a book, the slim Kindle is easy to hold while reading, even when reclining in bed. It's eco-friendly, and users can download a title from the Kindle bookstore and start reading -- all in less than a minute.

Werner doesn't see electronic book readers becoming the new way we read - just a different way for some readers.

In an informal Internet survey, early adopters of electronic book reading devices tended to be book lovers over the age of 50, in large part because of its high price tag, says Bob Edington, vice president of Internet Channel at Thomas Nelson Publishers in Nashville, which offers a vast majority of its best-sellers in e-book format, including 1,300 titles in the Kindle store.

Although e-book readers have been around for years, Amazon really broke through to the next level when it introduced the Kindle, Edington says.

"We're only in the beginning stages, and it will only grow," Edington says.

An estimated quarter-million to 1 million Kindles have been sold since it was introduced in November 2007. In July, Amazon said that of the 130,000 titles available on Kindle and in physical form, Kindle sales made up more than 12 percent of the sales of those titles, according to Time magazine.

Industrywide, e-books are about 1 percent of overall business but could grow to 5 percent to 12 percent in five years, says Frank Daniels III, chief operating officer of Ingram Digital Group in La Vergne, Tenn.

Improvements needed » Paul Rinkes, 36, says he's generally an early adopter of new technology and has read a lot about the Kindle, but he's holding out.

"I'm about as technologically wired as any person you'll meet," says Rinkes, a Franklin, Tenn., photographer. "If it should appeal to anyone, it should appeal to me."

Already, he and his wife read newspapers on their mobile phones, and he recently downloaded the Bible on his iPhone because he was always forgetting to bring a copy to church. "That was easier than having to remember to bring it," he says.

But he thinks e-book devices need to be cheaper and better designed before he and other tech-savvy book lovers join the club.

He's waiting to see whether Apple will come out with its own design or whether Amazon's 2.0 version of the Kindle, rumored for later this year, will be less clunky.

Indeed, it may take another generation of readers to fully adopt the devices. "The younger generation is so tuned into technology and grew up with computers and high-tech toys," says Teresa Fogarty, marketing publicity manager at the California-based Independent Book Publishers Association.

"But, books are always going to be around," Fogarty says. E-book devices "are not something people will cuddle up with."