It’s high season for art books, when publishers release their biggest, sexiest and most expensive titles in hopes that people still buy massive coffee-table tomes or intimate limited-edition artists books as gifts.

But this year, looking at the fall 2009 titles, I have been plagued by doubts: Is this new crop of titles — and perhaps with it the coffee table itself — becoming obsolete now that the Kindle and other e-readers are gaining in sales, with e-books now selling at nearly a third the volume of bound copies of the same title on Amazon.com?

I can’t pretend to be a disinterested observer. I have been a "book person" as long as I can remember. My first job in high school was working in a used-book store, and after college I worked as an editorial assistant for the literary publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I was thrilled my first day on the job to inherit a Rolodex with Joan Didion’s home phone number.

But I have friends who love, and even name, their e-readers. I bought the hardcover version of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski — which Amazon shrewdly uses in its Kindle campaign because it weighs roughly a ton, compared with the 10-ounce electronic device — and instantly regretted it. I have been reading about how you can share Kindle books with your iPhone using one easy app.

I feel I am on the verge of being seduced. But for what purpose? Will visually rich art books ever make their way onto Kindle? Should they?

As the Kindle universe stands now, art does not play a large role. Of the 336,000-plus titles offered on the device, only 1,080 belong to the category of "arts" or "individual artist," with another 521 in "photography," thanks mainly to the endless supply of digital-photography manuals. And there’s a clear bias in favor of the biographic or journalistic.

Few of the digitized art books are visual in nature. For starters, the publishers might not have permission for the original art to appear in this kind of product. On the technical side, the Kindle is programmed to dump text into standardized formats, while images are willfully idiosyncratic.

But the absence of the visual ultimately boils down not to the technology, which is surely available, but to cost. Even the larger-screen, magazine-friendly Kindle DX, released this May, skimps on color reproductions. The company says it delivers images in "16 shades of gray."

This might work for newspapers, but art books are another story. Even readers of novels express frustration that they can’t see the books’ covers on their Kindles. If covers are so long in coming, just imagine what it would take to create an art experience on an e-book that rivals that of a hardcover. The beauty of art books lies in their design, with the designer framing the reproduction of a painting on a page as carefully as a curator positions the original on the wall.

Consider the fall 2009 Distributed Art Publishers catalogue. Could MoMa’s massive new Bauhaus: 1919-1933, with its 400 color plates, ever work on a Kindle? I’m not even sure I want to see the DAP catalogue electronically, although an online version exists.

Looking at fall’s wealth of offerings gives me hope that art books will resist our e-book future. They could represent one of the last visually specific, design-rich holdouts in a sea of plain text. But I can hear a note of nostalgia creep into my writing, which makes me think I could be proved wrong. When I ran into fellow L.A. art critic Paul Young, he sniffed at my old-fashioned hopes for art books. "It’s just the opposite," he said. "They will be amazing in electronic formats — think about being able to download video art while you’re reading about it."

The critic Walter Benjamin missed half the story when he wrote about the loss of an artwork’s ritual power in the age of mechanical reproduction. Sure, photographs of paintings make the images readily accessible and (over)familiar, but they have also weirdly helped to cement the celebrity status of that original, irreplaceable, must-travel-far-to-see-in-person canvas.