Technology is expensive: sex sells. It's easy to see why sex and technology go hand in hand. Photography led to the naughty picture; videotape led to pornography; DVDs with their high quality and durability led to the explosion of the porn industry; home broadband added anonymity to high quality resulting in the ubiquitous availability of on-demand pornography straight to your computer. All these technological advances have one thing in common. They have been used primarily to satisfy the sexual wants of men.

That is understandable; all have provided visual media and the products have necessarily been aimed at the male market. Men are hard-wired to respond to visual stimuli. They have been targeted and they just haven't been help themselves. Or rather, they have. They have been able to help themselves to an enormous variety of pornography which has been made precisely to cater for their sexual wants. That is where the E-book is different. It steps back from the race of bigger, better, faster, more and provides a new subtle technology. However, it has been hijacked just as swiftly as a medium by which to sell sex, yet this time it is different. This time the target audience are women.

It is true that women could get something out of all the preceding technologies but the media itself wasn't designed with the intention of arousing women. Erotica is precisely that - descriptive passages of written words that connect with a woman's emotions. Good erotica uses those words to sweep-up the reader and immerse her in a different world. Gone are the highly defined specifics of pornography. There is a new fuzziness into which a woman can project herself in any way she chooses. Erotica has always been a way of living-out other lives, thoughts and fantasies - a way of breaking the constraints of reality, and even the limits of your own imagination. That has been its appeal.

In the same way that the internet gave men a way to be anonymous in regards to their consumption of pornography, Nooks, Kindles and the like have given women that same ability. They can log in and purchase erotica without revealing anything of themselves. But there has also been an explosion in the creation of erotica. Of course this is to satisfy the new demand - after all there are millions of women out there buying and reading erotica, flushed with the excitement of something new. But whereas previous technologies have been a one-way street, new ways of delivering sex into our lives, E-Books are again different in that they allow two-way traffic. More and more women are not just consuming but also creating erotica, wanting to contribute their own ideas and fantasies to the world. Of course a woman could always go and write an erotic novel before. But that is in the same way that a man could go and make a porn film. There were enormous barriers to entry. Self- publishing is an area which has seen the most spectacular impact by the rise of the E-Book. Anyone can write and use the technologies available to publish their ideas. And many are doing so for free.

So what of the erotic publishing houses - the Xcite's of this world? Do they still have a place given the rise in direct publishing? How can they compete when thousands of women are suddenly writing erotica and giving their work away for low cost or even free? Will they suffer and disappear in the same way as a multitude of porn makers did? In a word: no. In a competitive market, the weak will always fall by the wayside. But the erotic publishers are strong and for good reason. We can trust the publishers to act as quality control; to use their experience to filter-out the dross. We can purchase their products safe in the knowledge that it has been written to specific guidelines and professionally edited. That's important to us girls: after all, nothing grates like a typo when you're reaching the climax of a great story.