Back when the iPhone was still a new product, we used to hear a great deal about what a sea change it was causing in the world of video games. Gaming, previously considered the provinence of introverted, stay-at-home nerds sitting in the dark with a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, had suddenly become something that you might see on the bus, on the subway, at a restaurant. Unlike the portable gaming of the 90's and early 2000's, which usually took place on bulky, expensive gaming systems like the Game Boy, PSP, and others, the iPhone promised to put games in your pocket - and at a fraction of the price.

With portable handheld videogames costs still in the double-digits, the iPhone revolutionized videogame market strategy by proving that you can sell a game for $1 and still make a ton of money off of it. What resulted is what we now know as "casual gaming" - games that are bought casually, for small amounts of money, and which are played casually, often in bits and pieces as the gamers find free time.

What the iPhone once did for gaming they seem poised to do again - this time for reading. With Apple's iBooks catalogue growing more and more with each passing day, and more and more users realizing that they don't need an oversized iPad to comfortably read a book (I myself just finished my second iBook on my iPod Touch), Apple is ready to pioneer "casual reading." Got five minutes at the bus stop? Pull out your iPhone and read a little bit. Got an extra half hour on your lunch break? Choose a book from an entire pocket-sized library and get some reading done.

Apple's almost ready to start the casual reading revolution, but there's a few steps they'll need to take before they can do that. The first thing they need to do is convince users that they don't need an iPad to read an iBook - and considering the fact that no one can get their hands on the oversized tablets, that's something that's already in Apple's best interests anyway. Once users realize that reading a book on an iPod Touch or iPhone isn't all that much different from reading one on an iPad, Apple will see its iBooks sales pick up dramatically.

Apple has succeeded in taking things that are decidedly not casual - gaming, for example - and making them casual by giving people the ability to do them anywhere - at a low cost. If they can bring the cost of their iBooks down a bit, they'd be in prime position to seriously influence the book market. iBooks are currently cheaper than their printed equivalents at most book retailers, but certainly not as cheap as they should be, considering the lack of resources required to distribute them.

Just as it's become cool to be seen playing a game on your iPhone in public, so too will it become cool to be seen reading a book on one. That's good news, considering that experts say that the average American is spending less time reading books than almost any other point during the last eighty years.