Amazon.com is set to roll out its much anticipated Kindle e-book reader on Monday kindling hopes that at least this time e-books will take off.

Early reports suggest that Kindle will include a Wi-Fi connection to let consumers connect to Amazon’s e-book store and buy electronic books.

Priced at $399, the Kindle device is also supposed to include a headphone jack for audio-books and let consumers access content from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Le Monde.

The first generation of e-book devices had to be connected to a computer to download the electronic books.

The short history of e-books - digital versions of printed books that display on specialized reading devices or on PCs and laptops - is littered with a string of failures that includes both big names and small startups.

So far, only 100,000 e-book readers are said to have been sold in North America.

Readers of this blog with long memories may remember that in the late 1990s several companies including Microsoft, SoftBook, Librius, Glassbook, EveryBook and NuvoMedia threw their hats in the e-book arena but none of them made much headway.

At the world’s first e-book conference in Continue Reading…