In the lingo the business world likes to use, the e-book reader is starting to disrupt the book market. Currently, Amazon claims to own 70 to 80 percent of the e-book market. It kicked off its dominance with the Kindle, and last week discounted the price of the device (now in its third rendition) to fend off the competition from Apple's iPad and others.

The road to the end of the book on paper has started, according to Amazon. The online retailer has said it expects Kindle e-book sales to overtake paperback sales in the US by the end of 2011. Amazon now sells more Kindle e-books than hardbacks from its US Kindle store.

But like so much that happens in technology, it's going to be a rough one on consumers. For example different e-book standards are being created, leading to incompatibility among devices, what critics are calling the "Tower of eBabel". While I can lend my paper book to any literate person, I cannot easily do so with my e-book. The borrower would first have to download a specific format reader for that particular type of e-book to read it.

The book industry is also having a difficult time adjusting to the digital age, just like the film sector, and the music business. Their executives still have not come to terms with the power of the Internet and its transformation of their traditional way of doing business. The knee-jerk reaction is to guard what you have got, and protect the encroachment of the new.

Then someone - usually from outside the sector - spots the obvious and muscles their way into the business.

Something of the kind is happening in the book business. First, e-books are sold for less than the price of a paper copy. Smartly, Amazon has kept this as its business model from the start, compared to the music business which has tried to hold on to its revenues from the CD market.

But in the music business, the CD market is more dominated by the producers of the CDs, rather than the retailers, until Apple came along and disrupted that market a little. In, the book publishing business, the retailers seem to be more dominant than the publishers, with Amazon starting off as a pure internet business and setting the terms.

Here, the publishers and retailers like Amazon worked closely to lower prices, but at the expense of the writers, and here lies the rub. For paper books, publishers and authors split the proceeds evenly. With e-books the publishers decided to only hand over 25 percent royalties of net receipts, in effect charging the discount to them.

Now, writers and their agents have taken the obvious step: who needs you if the terms are onerous? That step was taken last week by author agent Andrew Wylie, who went out and created Odyssey Editions, which signed a distribution deal with Amazon, bypassing the publishers altogether. Now he can collect 100 percent of royalties for his agency and its authors. His stable includes Philip Roth and John Updike, so it is a major bypass.

The Authors Guild was correct in stating that the publishers "have largely brought this on themselves". Of course, the publishers are not taking this too lightly. Sticking to the old model, they have said they would boycott Wylie, that is, not do any more business with him. But they are attempting to stave off the inevitable, especially as authors under Wylie are now collecting over 60 percent of the net proceeds. That's a 300 percent pay rise!

"A major agency starting a publishing company is weird, no matter how you look at it," the Authors Guild says on its website, warning that the move is a potential conflict of interest. "This sort of weirdness will only multiply, however, as long as authors don't share fairly in the rewards of electronic publishing."

To throw another kink into this developing business model, both Amazon and Apple are now being investigated by the state of Connecticut for whether their agreements with e-book publishers violate antitrust laws by freezing competitors out of the market. The issue is over whether they received favourable status in securing discounted e-book prices for their stores.

This mix of changes and attempted changes is going to get more vicious over the next few years until they all work it out. In the meantime, you do not have to worry about which e-reader to get or which standard to adopt.

There are thousands of free downloadable books, many of them classics, at www.archive.org You can download them as a PDF. You can also go on Amazon's Kindle site and download the free software that allows you to read the Kindle format on your desktop computer or smartphone. Then you can download the free books available on the Amazon site, or even pay for one or two.

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Send any comments to Ahmed at elamin.ahmed@gmail.com