At university, I once attended a lecture entitled simply ‘The Book’. Given by an old schoolmasterly type, it was intended as a riposte to the avant-garde wing of the English department, who were peddling the view that all texts – be they web pages, films or conventional books – were equal. The lecturer argued, not unconvincingly, that there was something in the physical make-up of a book, and the way in which the reader interacted with it, that imparted knowledge and stirred passion.

I suspect that the lecturer, like most publishing houses, would have been sceptical about the electronic book, or e-book. Among publishers, the received wisdom is that their industry will emerge relatively unscathed from the digital revolution that is hammering their contemporaries in music and television. The complacency is understandable; the rise of e-books has been heralded ever since Project Gutenberg began creating a digital archive of out-of-copyright texts back in 1971, but so far the medium has failed to hit the mainstream.

Part of the reason is our peculiar relationship with books. Our bookshelves say things about us; about our level of education, where we’ve travelled, our aesthetic tastes and, of course, our political allegiances. Publishers say that we will never swap rooms full of books for a small electronic device that holds thousands of them – although it’s worth noting that record labels once pointed to treasured racks of LPs and CDs as evidence that that digital music wouldn’t catch on.

In truth, it’s poor technology – not sentimentality – that has stopped the e-book from going mainstream. While it has long been possible to download the entire works of Dickens onto a BlackBerry or palm-sized computer, the tiny, glaring screens have always made the process of reading Bleak House unbearable. That’s why Amazon’s Kindle, an e-book reader that launched just over a year ago, has gained so much attention. It uses eInk, a screen technology that makes digital pages appear just like printed ones.

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