No e-books allowed in this establishment

A few weeks ago I decided to mosey over to a local Manhattan coffee shop for an afternoon cappuccino.

After placing my order I sat down at a table and pulled out my Amazon Kindle.

I barely made it a sentence into the e-book I was reading before an employee of the coffee shop came by, stood over me and said, "Excuse me sir, but we don't allow computers in the coffee shop."

I looked up at him with an incredulous look and replied, "This isn't a computer, it's an e-book reader."

He then told me that the "device" in my hand had a screen and required batteries, so it was obviously "some variation of a computer." The coffee shop, I was told, did not allow the use of computers.

Annoyed with this distinction, I peppered the employee with questions on why reading on paper was more acceptable than reading on a screen. Flustered and confused by the existential debate he had been dragged into, the employee resolutely said, "Look, no computers in the coffee shop."

I was dragged into a similar dispute at a sandwich shop in Brooklyn, this time while reading and taking notes on my iPad. The employee there said no computers were allowed between noon and 3 p.m. After another lengthy defense of e-readers and screens, I lost, again, and sat there resentfully picking at my sandwich.

I wonder if people went through the same thing in the mid-1400s as they sat in coffee shops with their pesky paper books? I can imagine a coffee shop owner demanding that a patron remove his book from an establishment that only allowed spoken communication.

And how long will it take before e-books are accepted as equals with their paper counterparts?

The answer to that question might come sooner than we think. A report last week by the Center for the Digital Future at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California found that people were quickly moving away from print in favor of digital offerings (although the reports noted that readers don't entirely trust digital news yet).

On Monday, Ian Freed, Amazon's vice president for digital, told CNet that the number of e-books Amazon sold in the first quarter of 2010 had tripled compared to a year earlier.

Amazon also recently said that e-books have been outselling hardcover books for several months. And Apple said in early April that iPad owners were downloading hundreds of thousands of e-books from the iBookstore.

So what about that coffee shop that won't let me read a book on a screen? Even though I don't agree with the shop's logic and its distinctions between pixels and paper, I can appreciate a place hoping to offer an escape from computers and the Web. But as e-books continue to thrive and grow and more people, including students, replace their paper products with digital versions, these coffee and sandwich shops might not have much of a choice but to accept that some people now read books on screens -- even if they do look like computers.