"Hylozoic," the physical book: saying good-bye.

(Credit: Scott Stein/CNET)

It’s been widely debated since Amazon’s Kindle began redefining the e-book space: when will e-books become more compelling than the physical books they were meant to replace?

For me, it happened. Today, at 2 p.m. Eastern, I went to Borders and returned a book I bought just a week ago. The reason was this: I found the book had popped up on the Amazon Kindle store for less. So I pulled the trigger.

The funny thing is I don’t even have a Kindle. I have an iPhone 3G running the Kindle app. Yet, for me, in a crowded New York ecosystem where I barely have time or room to pull a book out of my backpack while crammed onto a subway, quick-fix iPhone reading does the trick better than anything else.

The book in question was “Hylozoic” by Rudy Rucker, an excellent and weird science fiction writer whose works I’ve become addicted to. I had tracked the release of his latest, a sequel to his equally odd “Postsingular,” for months. I should have ordered on Amazon in the first place, where it was far cheaper than Borders’ full retail, but I wanted instant satisfaction and got trigger-happy. Hylozoic wasn’t available on the Kindle store when the book first hit the streets.

I submitted a “this should be a Kindle book” request to Amazon and went back to my life, when yesterday I discovered that “Hylozoic” had in fact been added…for $14.95.

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