Will the e-reader become to books what the iPod is to CDs? The bookshop Borders has rolled out its new ebook service in the UK and Amazon has released a supersize version of its Kindle DX e-reader, just three months after the original release. The new larger Kindle has a 9.7 inch screen and can store up to 3,500 books.

Borders, which has more than 1,000 stores around the world, said it had been waiting until enough digital content was available to launch its ebook service in the UK. (The service has already been established in America.) Meanwhile, the British Library is coming close to the end of a two year project to digitise more than 100,000 books from the 19th Century.

Films, TV and music can all be downloaded online and watched on portable devices, so it’s logical that books should follow. The difference, however, is that people enjoy browsing in bookshops. The iPod may have killed the CD, but it seems unlikely the printed book will suffer the same fate at the hands of the e-reader. Julie Howkins from Borders told BBC News today that “Publishers are beginning to take notice [of ebooks] but I don’t think we have reached the music iPod moment for books at all. You would never get the same experience browsing through the shelves and being able to see books that you didn’t know existed. I can’t see Borders being a huge bank of computers, that’s not the way it’s going to go.”

That said, internet giant Google is about to make its foray into the e-book market with Google Book Search, a project that will dwarf the British Library’s efforts. The firm is currently in negotiations with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers to obtain a court agreement to allow Google to scan books that may still be in copyright.

At the moment, the printed word has a substantial cost advantage over the ebook: not only do e-readers cost several hundred pounds; the ebooks themselves can often be more expensive than their paper equivalents. Nevertheless, when prices come down and ebook content becomes widely available, we may yet witness the decline of the printed word.

Could web writing soon be transformed by a plethora of new terminology? For example, if I were to publish an online article in which I claimed to be a “nonebrity” would you know what I was talking about? Apparently it would mean I had celebrity status for no apparent reason. We can now all point at Katie Price a.k.a. Jordan and shout “Nonebrity!” the next time we see her. She, of course, might point back and shout “Nomophobe!” which is a person who fears being out of mobile contact.

More than 100 new words and expressions entered the English language last year, from the now-commonplace “credit crunch” to the rather more obscure “moofer”, which is an acronym for a mobile out-of-office worker. The most popular word from 2008 was, however, the dated expression “cripes”, which became Boris Johnson’s trademark expression of surprise as he campaigned during the London Mayoral election. Those who object to 2008’s most popular word being an old one might take comfort in learning that they themselves are known as “doomers” - a brand new expression to describe pessimistic individuals.

Next month we can all look forward to reading masses of web copy about “glamping”: the term refers to the luxurious form of camping undertaken by “nonebrities” such as Peaches Geldof at Glastonbury.