The e-book reader has slowly but surely made its way into the hands of digital bookworms with moderate success, but it’s real coming out party may come later this year.

Already, publishing houses such as Random House and Penguin have signed deals to provide content over Apple’s iTunes App store. It shouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination to see every other publishing house following suit, ultimately giving millions of iPhone/iPod Touch users easy access to long-form media content.

Along with the success devices like the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader have already have (let’s assume a combined sales total of about a half-million), comes news that Apple may soon launch a tablet-styled touchscreen “iPod Touch HD” in the coming year. Based on the success the iPhone has had, this new larger touchscreen form factor may be the catalyst needed to really drive massive interest towards the eBook medium.

Could this be the future of book publishing? While I doubt anything will be enough to pry away parchment and binding from people’s hands, it’s really a matter of time until technology is right for people to start reading their libraries on a comfortable electronic device.

As I see it, the developed world has finalized installing a wireless network capable of transmitting data over broadband speeds and with online retail shops such as Amazon and iTunes already fully mature, distribution shouldn’t be an issue. With any luck, all we need is a device like an iPod Touch HD to make this dream a reality.

A device like this could also do wonders for the newspaper industry. As the Kindle has already demonstrated, newspapers can find a home on an eBook reader. Merge that with a multimedia-ready device to take advantage of video, social networking and so forth. And hey, throw in a GPS radio to draw in advertisers with location-based advertising to drive more revenue in and everyone’s happy.

Looking forward, it isn’t outside the realm of possibilty that with enough popularity, a cheap, readily-available e-reader could revolutionize the media world. If everyone could pick one of these devices up for a reasonable price, say some cheap China-made model that retails for $29.99 plus a $10 monthly charge for all-you-can-eat content and maybe people will stop talking about the death of a newsprint-based journalistic product and start embracing a new digital media frontier.