Perhaps you do some or all of your book reading on an electronic device like a Kindle or i-pad. Conversely you may be someone who was never tempted to go digital in your reading. Or someone who tried an e-reader for a while but then discarded it in favour of that old familiar sensation of holding a book in the hand.

Most readers, even those of us who welcome the occasional convenience of e-books when travelling, say there’s no substitute for being able to handle a tangible object with covers, with a spine, with printed pages that can actually be fingered and turned. It’s a tactile pleasure worth cherishing – like stroking a cat.

What do writers think about e-books? As you’d expect, there’s some ambivalence. A recent online survey conducted for the Australian Society of Authors by a Macquarie University group (David Throsby et al.) probed authors’ opinions about the changing book industry, including e-books. A variety of views has emerged, of course, partly because authors’ experiences with e-books differ considerably according to the genre in question: sales in digital format tend to be higher for romance, travel, and ‘action’ stories than for literary fiction or young adult fiction. A shortage of reliable data complicates the picture, but many writers are troubled by the fact that the price of e-books keeps going down and therefore royalty returns are small except for self-published titles, where most of the income goes straight to the author.

Of course I’m very glad my novels are available in e-book format for those who prefer that medium – just as I’m glad that a couple of them have also been turned into audiobooks.

Nevertheless I don’t mind confessing that I still regard the traditional printed version (whether of my own publications or of those by other authors) as the Real Thing.

Why is this?

Well, part of it may be just an attachment to long-established reading habits, but there are a few practical reasons that go beyond simple nostalgia.

• Unlike a text that’s stored electronically, a physical book may be chanced upon among other books in a shop or library, picked up and browsed through. For me this has often led to serendipitous discoveries.
• It may be appreciated for its material properties – its size and shape, its weight in your hand, the texture of the paper it’s printed on, the particular look and feel of a well-bound hardback cover and its dust-jacket garb.
• It may be wrapped and presented as a gift. There could hardly be a similarly ceremonial transaction with an e-book.
• It may be autographed by the author, perhaps with an accompanying personal inscription. In a previous post I wrote about the value attached to signed copies.
• It may be annotated with a reader’s thoughts. Usually it’s irritating to open a library book and find someone’s far-from-discerning scribble in the margins; but in rare cases a previous reader’s comments can illuminate a passage, providing much the same interest as an intelligent conversational exchange.
• It may be preserved because of its personal associations, e.g. a beloved school prize or a battered old textbook from student days.
• It may be taken down occasionally from your shelf, re-read, and placed back in a different spot so that it rubs shoulders with a new set of literary companions.
• It may be passed on to other readers as a loan or a present or a charitable donation. I buy a lot of books and don’t have room to keep them all, so in the past few years I’ve given away thousands of them – many to universities (including a special collection of rare items donated to the Flinders University Library) or to charity shops.
• It may be handed down within a family. Recently Natasha Robinson wrote about this for The Weekend Australian – about how much she treasures certain books read to her as a child, which were never discarded:

My mother kept some of our childhood books. John Brown and the Midnight Cat was a favourite… Now I read that story to my children. The pages are tattered; more than a few are held together with sticky tape. But it’s a physical marker of a tradition, of a head resting in the nook of a mother’s arm after bath time, a time of absorption that is all too rare in this electronic world. Long may it live.