Next chapter in the digital revolution

Sherman Young, author of the Book is Dead: Long Live the Book, says it's just a matter of time before ebooks, like the Sony Reader seen here, replace paper editions. Photo / Glenn Jeffrey

When Sherman Young snuggles under the bedclothes to read a good book, he's reading off a small screen.

If he's on public transport, same thing.

The amiable doctor of media and culture from Macquarie University in Sydney reckons reading books by computer is the future.

Never, I say, and he says I am probably one of those people who resisted getting a cellphone.

Hmm, true. I confess I resisted for a long time, then when I got one I wondered how I'd ever lived without it.

"Ding," he says. "There you go."

Young, who was attending a conference in Auckland on the future of books, reckons pretty soon even the Luddites among us will wonder why we baulked at reading a good book digitally.

The very thought raises hackles.

"I would rather kill myself than read a book by computer," said a colleague when the topic was raised in the office sparking a loud debate.

Oh yes, the colleague said, it would be a cold day in hell when that happened.

Only one colleague, and an older one at that, actually wanted one of the new-fangled devices on the market (though not freely available in New Zealand yet) which allow you to download almost any number of books and read them from a screen.

The first colleague, who incidentally has embraced ipods and Google, tried to explain why reading a book with actual pages and a cover was different and how reading a book digitally will never cut the mustard.

For him, the reason boils down to the vibe of the thing. It's about the whole "experience" of a book. It's the way a book smells and feels. It's the way you turn the page.

It's a tactile, sensory thing.

Dr Young has heard all this before and laughs in a friendly, just-you-wait-and-see kind of way.

He has written his own book, called The Book is Dead: Long Live the Book. It's on his iPhone, all 180-odd pages of it.

He touches the screen to turn a page and glides back and forth like an expert, jumping to wherever he wants to go.

He also has an ebook reading gadget, a Sony Portable Reader. It's a slim little number about the size of a small paperback tucked inside a protective cover which kind of gives the look - if you look very quickly - of an actual book. You push a button to turn the page.