MIAMI — “Vanishing stores are sad way to close book,” read one headline. “The last days of once upon a time,” said another.

Last month’s news that the giant Borders bookstore chain had collapsed, taking 400 stores and 11,000 employees with it, leaving behind only a couple of hundred millions of dollars in IOUs to publishers, was for many the seventh sign of an impending apocalypse: for bookstores, for the art of reading, for the very concept of literacy.

But rather than the first steps of a funeral cortege, the death of Borders is really just the first little dip on a wildly careening roller coaster ride for the people who write, publish, buy and sell books. It’s going to shake us up, down and sideways, industry figures say, and some people may get thrown from their cars. But one group is sure to be happy at the end: readers.

“The whole book culture is changing, and in some ways, I think it’s worth worrying about,” says Jack Shafer, who writes about media at Slate.com and spent years working at bookstores before turning to journalism. “But we are so much better off now with what we’ve got. There’s a cornucopia of books out there. It may be that the bookstores are vanishing, but readers are going to have more choice and cheaper books.

“Is it good for bookstores, for writers, for agents, for publishers? We readers don’t care. It’s really good for us.”

Enter the e-reader. The little device at the bottom of all these changes is an 8-by-5-inch digital gadget on which you can read — and, more importantly, buy — books. E-readers, as well as tablets such as the iPad, can turn reading into a multimedia experience: Imagine reading a book on the Beatles while a video of them singing “I Want To Hold Your Hand” on the “Ed Sullivan Show” appears beside the text. It can also turn your local bookstore into a desolate cybercemetery, roamed only by the ghosts of customers downloading their books from the Internet while they sit at home.

The e-reader has been around for well over a decade, supposedly slouching toward commercial Bethlehem if you believed tech nerds and Wall Street analysts, but never seeming to actually arrive. Until now.

“We’re seeing triple-digit percentage growth in e-books from last year,” says Andi Sporkin, spokeswoman for the Association of American Publishers, which later this month will publish the industry’s first-ever comprehensive statistical look at book publishing. “In February, e-books were actually the leading seller in all book formats — hardcover, paperback, whatever.”

Those astonishing sales numbers for February were actually a bit of a glitch, reflecting a surge in downloading by people who got e-readers and e-book gift certificates for Christmas. But nobody doubts that they’re the headlights of an oncoming e-locomotive that will roar through the publishing industry, smashing anything foolish enough to get in its way.

“There is a massive change in this business due to e-book technology,” says Mitch Kaplan, owner of the Coral Gables, Fla.-based Books & Books mini-chain. “And it’s happened faster than I could ever have imagined. A couple of years ago, e-books were maybe 2 percent of the business. Now we think it will be 25 percent by the end of the year, and there’s no end in sight yet.”

E-readers first went on the market in the 1990s. But high prices ($400 and up) of early models, coupled with their clumsy technology and a general skepticism about the technology, relegated them to the fringe of the market. It was only in 2007, after the launch of the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader — both of which used a new technology known as e-ink to give their text a more booklike appearance — that consumers really got on board. Sales of e-books rocketed more than 1,000 percent over the next four years, from about $32 million in 2006 to $441 million in 2010, and are expected to top the $1 billion mark this year.

That cascade of dollars is already remaking the entire book industry.

“I think there’s been more change in the last two years than in the last centuries,” says David Young, chairman and CEO of the Hachette Book Group, one of the world’s largest publishers.

Other industry figures say that’s too mild by half. “E-books make the Gutenberg system, which still characterizes the industry after 500 years, absolutely obsolete,” insists Jacob Epstein, the veteran publisher who invented trade paperbacks and founded the New York Review of Books.