The reports of my death are greatly...oh wait, no, maybe not.

Will books go the way of the dodo

Terrible news from Amazon today as they glowingly report that sales of the Kindle will account for 10 per cent of its business next year. Extremely speedy, when you consider how new the Kindle product is. In May, Amazon announced that in the US Kindle ebook sales had outstripped print book sales after only four years. Waterstones, an established bookshop into which you can walk and leaf through and choose to buy a physical book with your own bare hands and even with coins if you choose, confirmed this dismaying trend. "For every hardback we sell online, we sell four ebooks online," said a spokesman. Four. FOUR! That is a scary statistic, scary, at least, if you're an advocate of the book in it's corporeal form. And I am. I really am. I am not a luddite - in fact, I have read books on my iPhone. I know it's smaller than the Kindle, but it's basically the same principle. I was reading The Count of Monte Cristo recently, quite a tome, and annoying to carry about in a bag if you're just going to read it on the train or the bus. So I downloaded the free copy of it from iTunes, and read the digital copy when going about the place, and the physical copy when at home. But it just wasn't the same.

I think that's where the difference will always lie - there will be a (hopefully not too small) group of people who will just feel that there is something different or special or satisfying about reading a book, with pages and a cover and a spine, rather than reading an ebook. Something inexplicable, something psychological, an emotional attachment, just wanting to rub the pages or write on them, appreciating it more for it's cover. Something that the hard glossy shell of a Kindle or an iPad* won't be able to convey. The iPhone has a page turning sound effect. That's just stupid. Read a book if you want the aural pleasure of a page turning. I really do hope that as ebooks sell more and more, real books are going to increase in price, the way it is with vinyls. But it probably will. Progress. Onwards and upwards.


*By the way iPad, comeback please? If this must happen don't let the Kindle win!