I have been wanting to get an e-book reader ever since my daughter Pauline showed me her Kindle last year.

I actually had one of the earliest readers, the Sony Rocket Reader, back in early 2001. My friend Mick Curran and I were getting a book published by Mighty Words, one of the first of the e-book ventures. We each made about $2,000 on "The Woman in the Box," but the site didn't succeed and I think much of its content eventually wound up way back in the storage sites of Barnes &amp; Noble.

You may recall the fuss at the time. Stephen King published a novella -- I think it was called "Riding the Bullet" -- for e-books. The story eventually wound up in one of his collections, and e-books sort of went into hiatus for a while.

<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/barns-noble-nook-ebook-reader.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-355" title="barns-noble-nook-ebook-reader" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/barns-noble-nook-ebook-reader-252x300.jpg" alt="" width="252" height="300" /></a>Now there are three competing models -- Amazon has the Kindle, Sony has its own model and Barnes &amp; Noble has the <a title="Nook" href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/index.asp?cm_mmc=Redirect-_-nook.com-_-Storefront-_-nook" target="_self">Nook</a>.

I decided my trip to Texas would be a pretty good time to get one. Since I'm going to be away for two months, I'll have lots of time to read.

I got a Nook, and they even gave me "Pride &amp; Prejudice," "Little Women" and "Dracula" for free.

That's a pretty good start, and most of the best-sellers go for about half the price they do in hard-cover. They're about the same cost as a paperback edition, although they take up less space.

Reading has always been one of the truly great joys of my life, and there are few ways in which my children have made me happier than the fact that they both love to read.

My little granddaughter Maddie loves books too.

She's got good genes from her mother and her grandmother.

As I read some books on my Nook, I'll let you know what the experience is like.

I'm looking forward to it. Then again, I seem to be looking forward to a lot these days.

It's really a nice feeling.