It is about the size of a paperback, but it looks more like a clunky old electronic calculator.

The book, a technology tried and tested over centuries, came under renewed assault yesterday when one of the world’s largest booksellers revealed a rival device.

The online bookseller Amazon has produced the digital reader, dubbed the “Kindle”, in an attempt to do for literature what the iPod has done for music.

The 10¼oz (290g) Kindle can download a book wirelessly in under a minute and store up to 200 volumes to be read on its “electronic ink” screen.

“The question is, can you improve upon something as highly evolved and well-suited to its task as the book? And, if so, how?” Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive officer, told a press conference in New York. “It has to disappear.”

Mr Bezos’s effort to become the new Gutenberg is perhaps the most ambitious project yet from the pioneer of online retailing.

The Kindle, which went on sale yesterday in America for $399 (£195), offers access to about 90,000 books and 11 daily newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Customers can download best-sellers for a discounted $9.99, and classics such as Dickens’s Bleak House sell for $1.99 each. Single copies of leading newspapers sell for a cut-price 75 cents, or customers can pay a monthly subscription .

The device also offers access to the Wikipedia online encyclopedia and about 300 blogs. It also plays MP3 music files and has a slot for a memory card so that it can hold hundreds more books.

“We want to make sure everything anyone wants to read is on the Kindle,” said Laura Porco, Amazon’s director of digital text. “We won’t stop until we can offer millions of books.”

Charlie Tritschler, the head of the Kindle project, said that the name came from the “concept of kindling the love of reading”. Amazon has spent three years developing the device with a technology called “E Ink”.

E Ink particles are activated electronically to form the words on the page, giving the screen the matte quality of ink on paper.

The user cannot scroll down, as on a computer. Instead, the reader must flip the whole page backwards or forwards using controls that run along the side of the device.

But because there is no backlighting, the 6in screen is easy on the eyes. The battery can last for up to a week of reading.

Kindle users connect to Amazon’s online bookshop to browse and pick the volumes they want. But the Kindle is equipped with mobile phone technology that means that the user can download books anywhere – at least in America. Its EV-DO phone technology is not supported in Europe and Amazon officials refuse to say when, or if, they plan to market a European version of the digital book.

Not all publishers have agreed to sell to Kindle users. Penguin USA has balked at Amazon’s prices for its best-sellers. But Amazon is selling Kindle customers Alan Greenspan’s The Age of Turbulence, a Penguin book, at the discounted price anyway.

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