The former lawyer, whose best sellers include "The Firm" and "A Time To Kill", had previously held off selling his books electronically, expressing concern that e-books would wipe out traditional book stores and make it harder for new writers to succeed.

But beginning Tuesday, all Grisham's fiction and non-fiction books will be available through e-book retailers, publisher Random House said.

While he predicted there will be fewer bookstores in the future, he said bookstores will never go away, agreeing with "interviewer" David Young of Hachette Book Group that bookstores are where bestsellers are made, particularly for books that are put in the front of the store.

TUAW has learned that Apple has begun rejecting all e-book submissions because "this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing upon third party rights. We have chosen to not publish this type of application to the App Store." At first glance, this policy seems in line with Apple's approach to applications that promise charitable contributions. Apple cannot police the developers and will not allow possibly fraudulent postings on their store. Apple does not want to be in the position of vetting rights claims.

At the same time, Apple has been rejecting applications from content providers who do in fact own the rights to their materials and can prove those rights. A colleague who spoke on the condition of anonymity related that a project he developed for a national content syndicate was rejected without recourse. He still got paid for his work but the application languishes without an outlet.

Apple isn't stopping with content source providers. They're also targeting those who provide media browsing tools. Another developer who built an e-book reader received a recent rejection along the same lines. The application might be used to read copyright infringing books, so Apple will not let it in App Store. In an e-mail, he wrote, "Leaving aside the presumption of innocence, [what] about iTunes and iPod; shouldn't they be banned too? After all many users indeed are using them to listen to the music that is not always legally obtained."

A new approach developed by Philips now offers fresh hope for color e-paper displays that are so bright and clear that even traditional liquid crystal displays (LCDs) will pale in comparison. According to Kars-Michiel Lenssen, who headed the work at Philips Research, based in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, the new approach has the potential to create color images that are three times brighter than displays that use color filters, including LCDs. "This is the closest an electronic-paper technology ever got to printed paper," he says.

Color displays normally require four subpixels--red, green, blue, and white--to create each full-color pixel. "That costs you in terms of resolution," says Pieter van Lieshout, head of product research and development for Polymer Vision, which was spun off from Philips Electronics three years ago to develop flexible electronic-paper displays.

The other consequence of using a color filter is that it reduces the brightness of a display, says Sri Peruvemba, vice president of marketing at E-Ink, in Cambridge, MA, which was spun out of research at MIT in 1997. For example, making the entire screen red using subpixels means that only a quarter of the screen will actually be red. In contrast, Philips Research's approach involves turning the traditional electronic-paper pixel quite literally on its side, in order to tune it to different shades of the spectrum.

The prolific, best-selling novelist said Thursday that 71 of her books -- and that's not even all of them — will be made available digitally Feb. 24, including her latest, "One Day at a Time." Other works include "Sunset in St. Tropez," "The Promise" and "Leap of Faith."

In recent weeks, John Grisham and Tom Clancy also have agreed to allow their novels to come out as e-books, a tiny, but quickly growing market.

Hikari said she spends on average three hours a day reading cell phone novels, giving her parents a monthly bill of 40,000 yen (350 dollars). Kanno is one of the majority of Japanese secondary school students who own cell phones and spend an average of two hours a day on their phones, as opposed to just 26 minutes reading books, according to a recent government report.

Publishing companies have pounced on the craze, printing some of the most widely read cell phone novels into books. Three novels that originally targeted cell phones topped the bestseller lists in 2007, according to leading book distributor Tohan Co. Among the top 10 novels, half were written for cell phones. Authors have inevitably had to adapt to the cell phone novel, which appears on the small handset screens in short, downloadable installments.

The text is written horizontally with wide spaces separating each line, unlike most Japanese novels that are written vertically and in small font. Writers generally use simple language, short phrases, "emoticon" icons and jargon popular among youngsters.

"Although cell phone novels were initially snubbed by traditional writers, they reflect our time. They could develop into a new literary genre so we must keep our minds open," said Mikio Funayama, the spokesman of Japan's most prestigious literary journal "Bungeikai". "I think cell phone novels appeal to many people because they are easy to read and understand. Readers are able to share with the author the feelings written in them. And there's an element of pop culture too," he told AFP.