Miro Adamy carries his ebook reader with him and pulls it out whenever he has to wait in line. (Kate Porter/CBC)

Readers can now borrow books from the Ottawa Public Library while in Florida, Thailand, or their own homes. And once they have the book, they won't have to worry about returning the book or whether they'll get a fine for it being overdue.

The only catch is that the books can't have any covers or pages — they must be one of the hundreds of e-books that the library started making available to its patrons over the past two months.

Tara Wong, whose job at the library is to keep abreast of new technologies in the book industry, said the library quietly launched its new e-book program in October and will start promoting its new electronic holdings in January.

The books include fiction and non-fiction for all ages and take the form electronic documents, (mostly .pdfs) that can be downloaded to your computer from the library's website. After three weeks, the file is automatically deleted, so there is no need to return it.

Wong said that after the library began offering digital audio books, which take the form of a sound file, patrons started sending e-mails to the library asking when it would start offering e-books, like libraries in Toronto, Hamilton, Oakville and Edmonton.

All e-books available in large print

She said the books are handy for travellers and for people with disabilities, including those with visual impairments since e-books allow readers to increase the size of the text on their screen.

'There were no trees that had to be killed in order to produce this book...No electrons were harmed in the process.'— Miro Adamy, e-book enthusiast

"It'll never take the place of a physical book, I do believe that," she said. But she said they are a welcome addition to suit different lifestyles.

E-books are already fully integrated into Miro Adamy's lifestyle. The Kanata software developer downloads free books online and reads them on his home computer as well as his Pocket PC, his Apple iPhone and the Sony reader digital book that he takes with him everywhere, in case he ever has to stand in line while shopping.

"If you have 10, 15 minutes, you can spend 10, 15 minutes of do nothing, or you can spend 10, 15 minutes of reading something interesting," he said.

Adamy said he likes the fact that e-books are cheap and easy to delete if you don't want to keep them any more.

Cheap, green, disposable

"[If] I don't like it, 'bam!' — it's gone, in no time," he said. "There were no trees that had to be killed in order to produce this book.… No electrons were harmed in the process."

Adamy said e-books haven't gone mainstream largely because there isn't yet a universal format for reading them.

Nevertheless, many traditional publishers are cranking out e-books. Random House in the U.S. now publishes more than 8,000 titles in digital format and announced in November that it plans to hike its e-book offerings to 15,000 within months. Houghton Mifflin and Penguin books have started making e-books available through iTunes.

Meanwhile, staff at two Sony stores in Ottawa reported this week that they are selling about 10 Sony reader digital books a day at $300 each, and were even out of stock for awhile. The reader was launched in Canada just last spring.

Still, not everyone in the store was sold on the idea.

Sean Floyd, who was shopping there with his father Mark said he thinks it's more interesting to read a real book, the readers are expensive and e-books do have their issues.

"A real book wouldn't run out of battery," he said.

Mark Floyd agreed, adding that visiting the library online wouldn't be the same as going there.

"I don't know what in the electronic world would re-create the joy of walking through the stacks and picking out your own books," he said.