Three recent announcements confirm that eBooks have arrived and are here to stay. NY1's Adam Balkin filed the following report.

In just the past couple of weeks, there have been three notable developments that seem to indicate electronic books, or eBooks, will continue to gain and stronger foothold in our futures.

Most recently, Disney Publishing Worldwide unveiled Disney Digital Books, an online portal where 500 classic and contemporary titles would be made available for $9 a month or $80 a year. The texts have new, interactive formats.

"It was critical for us in looking at how we reach both parents and children that we go directly to them and make our content available on the platforms that they're very familiar with," says Jeanne Mosure of Disney Publishing Worldwide. "We not only have the reading experience with the 'turn the page,' we have additional features of a 'look and listen.' So for younger children, there is an audio component where books are read aloud to them."

The second development is the new $400 iRex DR800SG digital reader. There are already two existing heavyweights in the eReader hardware space, the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader, but the iRex is the first with access to Barnes and Noble's digital catalogue.

The third development that really helped legitimize eBooks in just the last several days, is that when Dan Brown, author of the "Da Vinci Code," released his latest book "The Lost Symbol," Amazon.com initially sold more digital copies than hard copies.

David Carnoy, the executive editor of the tech website CNET.com, is also interested in eBook developments as a self-published author. He says that the development of a different type of reading experience may lead to a different type of book.

"You're going to see interactive novels, graphic novels, on all these devices. We're going to see new forms of literature come out of these devices," says Carnoy. "These are fledgling devices, the Kindle, the Sony Reader. We're only in the infancy in these, and in five years from now these will change a lot."

Some speculate that maybe this current generation of children will form a different definition of reading that extends beyond simply sitting down and going from cover to cover.