Horror scenario for book-lovers

I have this recurring nightmare every time I read anything about this one particular piece of new technology...

I’m in this creaking old secondhand bookshop. The distinctive aroma of fusty, nicotine-coloured pages hangs in the air, the bare wooden floors are reassuringly uneven, a thin layer of dust lines the banks of shelving. There’s just one thing missing...books! Real books that is. One sad old desk stands to the rear of the echoing shop. On top of it is one of those heavyweight computer terminals - all yellowing plastic and green-screened antiquity. Beyond the desk is a door, open just enough to see through to a dimly lit storeroom and a rack of humming network servers.

This is the secondhand bookshop of the future - paperless but kept alive by the hard drive space it can give to all the obscure and unpopular ‘books’ that Amazon or Waterstone’s no longer want on their warehouse-sized battalions of on-line servers.

So, you trot along, have a sniff or what used to be, scan through the ‘almost out of print’ database on the flickering old computer, make your choice, hitch up your Kindle, pay the nice old lady who sits knitting on the other side of the desk (she’s given up dusting the shelves), and away you go, cherished book safely stashed on your hard drive.

Apologies to anyone not yet familiar with the Kindle - Amazon’s amazing ‘wireless reading device’, or indeed the eReader, ‘a new way to enjoy books from Sony’, but you need to get up to speed with what’s happening out there in book world. My perfectly rational take on this is that it’s a huge conspiracy starring some of the world’s most powerful technology and retailing giants and their mission is to eliminate the book as we know it, strip all the lovely tactile elements from the reading experience, banish the beauty of cover art and plonk the whole thing on a frigid slab of plastic-coated printed circuitry.

I sense that Sony already know I’m on to them. On their website they declare ‘eReader doesn’t have to replace your traditional books...’ Well no it doesn’t but I bet they said that about those lovely big cardboard and plastic concoctions called vinyl albums when CDs first reared their little silver heads and we all know what happened there!

Jez