The printed word is quite well with me thanks Mr DIgital

I understand there is meant to be a complete jettisoning of the word on the old-fashioned page that you can touch, read and turn over to find another one with a flick of a couple of fingers and a thumb. This, apparently, is imminent, or as Karl Marx might have said, immanent. I have to admit to some confusion though, because day by day I meet people who haven’t yet bought a tablet or gone the next step and followed the logic of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and got rid of their traditional print-based books from their toilets, bedside cabinets, bookshelves and garages. So perhaps we’re at one of those moments in history, one of those turning points that, whilst when our descendants look back in a hundred years will be momentary, at this point it seems to be hung endlessly in the air around us, waiting for resolution.

What do we do then? Do we continue to read the book, carry it with us, lend it to friends? Do we continue to haunt old bookshops in those towns – York (almost medieval in their ancientness), Hay on Wye (home of the internationally renowned biggest bookshop to say nothing of the festival), Moffatt (at least 4 in the Lowlands alone) – and to gather up our finds and browse through them before stacking them away on crowded shelves when we return home.

Or do we follow the insistence of a colleague of mine who tells me to get rid of my books as soon as possible? He already has and he’s proved to himself and his world that he could manage without them in the first place. The Tablet is only his corroborating evidence, an accessory after the fact.

I’m just not ready. Just as I still buy a newspaper or two or three most days of the week and prefer to sit with a coffee anywhere and turn those pages over, sometimes finishing up with piles of untidy but fascinating journalism all over every nearby surface from things I’ve spotted, so I can’t see any comparison between this and the brief synopses on the internet of the vast richness of the writing I encompass in those couple of hours most days.

Clearly, there are different forms in which ‘the word’ is made available to us. You could argue that the advent of the e book adds to the richness of what’s available. You could also argue that putting various journals and newspapers on line, as well as summarising a host of TV sources of news, adds to the richness. But what I can’t rid my mind of is this nagging doubt that when at the end of reading my novel on the tablet, I still don’t own the book in a physical sense and I can’t pass it to the person I would like to borrow and read it as well and I can’t at the end of the process add it to those new shelves I’ve just installed in my study – the largest room in our house, spreading its books like a benign germ into other rooms when I need them by me – when I have these doubts about the e books, they don’t seem to be answered by any of this wonderful digital innovation. Maybe we have to wait until the bookless generation comes along that hasn’t experienced a hard covered or a paperback covered book in the hand and thinks the whole reason for having a printed page of words only existed in the amorphous past. Only then will people stop reading in the traditional way. And frankly, I hope that by then I’m beyond bothering.