With PowerPoint presentations, Palm Pilot-beaming executives and cell phones trilling in the audience, last November's e-Book World seemed typical of the hundreds of business-tech gatherings held every year. But it wasn't. In fact, it was the first conference devoted solely to the forthcoming transformation of the book world by digital technology. Hundreds of people from around the world paid as much as $995 to hear some of the most influential editors and publishers in the United States forecast radical changes in the writing, distribution and reading of printed material.

During the two-day conference, the agents, authors, technologists and publishers in attendance repeatedly heard that the day of ordinary books, magazines and newspapers was almost over. The key cause of this demise, attendees were told, will be the newly developed e-book. So powerful will be the onrushing wave of e-books, confidently predicted Dick Brass, Microsoft vice president of technology development, that "the last paper edition of The New York Times will appear in 2018."

The new e-books were on display in the exhibit space. They were, for the most part, keyboardless computers, each about the size of a paperback. Visitors gingerly tapped the screen or thumbed a button to "turn" the pages on these gray boxes; with some models, readers could "bookmark" favorite passages. Don't be fooled by their unprepossessing appearance, conference organizer and author Michael Wolff warned in his keynote speech. "The e-book," he proclaimed, "is the most significant development in the book business since the advent of the paperback."

Maybe. Digital technology and books, magazines and newspapers are certainly going to collide, just as Wolff said. And, as he also said, the results will have an enormous social and cultural impact. But the key invention will not be the electronic book-at least not the gray boxes on exhibit at e-Book World. Instead, it will be a development that not a single speaker at the conference addressed-a product that not one of the companies in the exhibit displayed. Although the collective imagination of the publishing industry has been captured by the current generation of electronic books, the technology that is most likely to transform reading and writing will be electronic paper.