The early poets were resistant to the technology of writing and the alphabet (in effect, the virtualisation of speech) because they believed people’s minds would become lazy: we would not need to remember things. Since then, every development in mankind’s ability to set down, capture, disseminate, to communicate the word, has been met with opposition, for both aesthetic and political reasons. Despite pressures from successive Ottoman emperors for their universities to adopt Gutenberg’s printing press, for example, the trade union of scribes across the Empire prevented this from happening, causing, according to historian AJ Akbar, one of the original cultural convergences between the Islamic world and the West. Much later, when they all stopped laughing at Edison, people began to worry what his ability to record voices would do for reading. And, according to André Leroi-Gourhan in La Geste et la Parole (1964), it was writing itself that was on its last legs: ‘For centuries yet reading will go on being important…but writing is probably doomed to disappear rapidly to be replaced by dictaphonic equipment with automatic printing’.

Voice recognition software has not put paid to writing any more than writing turned our minds to mulch; nevertheless, the early poets were partly right – the tradition of reeling off epic narratives has fallen away somewhat since the time of Homer, and a literate society, at great gain, has also lost something: the poetry it produces is different from that produced by wholly oral cultures. Or, in a different example, radio (followed by television) halted the tradition, popular among those with education and time for leisure, of reading aloud in the evening after supper. The most potent example is the internet, which combines reading, writing, listening and watching. It is the distillation of a multi-tasking society. Each day we employ a host of communication technologies: I write a list while listening to ‘Book of the Week’ on Radio 4, idly leafing through my emails and chatting on the phone.

The cacophony of voices grows ever louder. Events barely need to happen before an army of commentators discuss, debate, describe, opine. And we respond – hermeneutically, textually, vociferously. Given our lust for spewing and absorbing word and image, in whatever form (and let us not forget that writing on the page is an image just as a picture is), is it surprising, then, that the book, that old-faithful disseminator, instrument of God Almighty, currently seems to be doing rather well?

First, we need to address this claim. Book sales are undoubtedly healthy: 65,000 new titles were published in Britain in 1990; last year this figure had risen to 161,000. Quantity, of course, is not necessarily a good thing. Dr Johnson was complaining 250 years ago about the amount of books being published. ‘How few there are’, he lamented to his friend, Mrs Thrale, ‘of which one can ever possibly arrive at the last page’. Jasper Milvain, in George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), belonged to a type who cynically churned out literary ‘food for the ‘mob’ – for those ‘who can’t distinguish between stones and paste’. In ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’ (1946), George Orwell paints a depressing picture of the literary hack surrounded by piles of books, proposing that most get around two or three a year that they ‘would enjoy writing about’. For Orwell, ‘until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority are’.

But, wearying though this all may be for those in the business, a wide choice for the public must be better than its opposite. Initiatives like the Richard and Judy Book Club have genuinely got more people reading books, and talk about ‘dumbing down’ is knee-jerk literary snobbery. It is better to read Harry Potter than nothing at all, and reading for pleasure among society at large has always involved ‘eschewing more challenging fare’: in the mid-nineteenth century the ‘penny dreadfuls’ of GWM Reynolds vastly outsold Dickens. Britain sustains a healthy review press, supported by a mind-boggling array of websites devoted to literary matters; individual book clubs are increasingly popular; and over the past decade the melding of quality literature and more ‘accessible’ leisure activities has most notably been apparent in the hundreds of literary festivals that have sprung up around the country. Byron was the original pop star, to be replaced a century later by musicians. Now popular festivals cater to both; literary celebrity is back in vogue.

The internet, then, does not immediately seem to have harmed literature. We may all employ a grammar over texts and emails that our great-grandparents would have been appalled by, but this should be seen as invigorating. We are constantly morphing additional language at our disposal to reinvent our quotidian dialect. Those who were formerly likely to produce literature have not been damaged by new electronic forms of writing, and those who never wrote much in the first place are finding it increasingly valuable to do so. New technologies mean new audiences; and this, let us not forget, is a global phenomenon. One other bonus of the internet is that it allows us to track precisely what people are reading (and how long they spend reading it). This is currently a particular boon to newspaper editors. Formerly, they could judge their readership only on what seemed to sell papers. Now they can judge precisely what parts of their paper are being read.

Reading in Britain, then, is thriving. But whilst novels fly off shelves, what of the future of the book itself? Earlier this year, the literary editor of the Observer, Robert McCrum, wrote an article suggesting that books as we know them may have a limited lifespan (McCrum 15.1.2006). They are being challenged by the technology of epaper, and McCrum cites the claims of a former vice president of Microsoft:

Tablet devices are getting lighter and cheaper. Eventually, and I’m betting that it will be before 2020, one of these devices, like the iPod in music, will offer an experience close enough to paper to shift the paradigm to digital distribution. That will mark the beginning of the end of the age of paper books.

For Jacob Weisberg, editor of American e-magazine Slate, ‘owning printed books will eventually become synonymous with collecting them’. The philosopher Brian Rotman goes further, postulating that eyeglasses will project ‘micro-reduced words onto the retina’ (further still, directly into the brain via an implant). Will consuming knowledge become a bit like consuming electronic drugs? As computers become increasingly organic, will our brains become increasingly computer-like?

While Rotman’s suggestions seem somewhat fantastical, the threat from epaper is very real. But ebooks are still books aren’t they? – just as listening to an iPod is not unlike listening to a CD. And if, as the technology improves, the experience of reading them becomes increasingly similar to that of reading ‘real’ books, what can possibly be the problem? Why can’t we foresee snuggling down with our ebook? – and think of all that paper saved!

A multitude of copyright issues will have to be negotiated (the record industry is currently battling with an analogous situation). But a bigger concern is how the ebook may change the way we read. Might it encourage superficial engagement with literature and indulge our impatient natures? Just think of music, so the argument goes, with the MP3 player that allows us to select specific songs rather than take time to get to know an album, and the shuffle button that is never far away. Back to the gripes of those early poets: our concentration has been irredeemably affected.

Could there be a comparable outcome with ebooks? Granted, we are probably not less likely to read something the whole way through – especially a novel; but how will our focus be affected by our ability to carry all our favourite books on a single device? Are we more likely to flick through the ‘highlights’ and less likely to stumble across gems we didn’t know we were looking for? Our reading may also be affected by the multimedia format of electronic devices: our experience with books is likely to become more varied and interactive. There is no reason why ebooks will not incorporate sound and moving images. Won’t the ‘multitasking’ problem of the multimedia format make reading less gloriously solipsistic?

More tangible dilemmas are those of cataloguing and dissemination. One problem highlighted by Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, centres on Google’s recent decision to digitise the holdings of several major libraries. This is the first step on Google’s prospective path towards a universal library. Many have worried about potential copyright infringements, but for Jeanneney a bigger concern is Google’s potential to misrepresent the world’s cultural heritage. The dangers of cultural imperialism are striking. Jeanneney points to Google’s qualitatively unsystematic digitisation of books from a few partner libraries and its reliance on Anglophone texts. He performed a Google book search in which results for Hugo, Cervantes, Dante and Goethe resulted in just one non-English edition – a German translation of Hugo.

Google’s response is that it is innocently making available for all, and for free, texts that might have previously been difficult to get hold of; and, in time, as Google Library expands, it will incorporate a wider range of literature and languages, as part of its lofty ‘mission statement’ to ‘organize the world’s information’. Google is guaranteed to be at the forefront of ebook technology. Only in September, it enabled its users to start downloading entire books as pdfs. And whatever the outcome, ebooks are inevitable. But it would be rash to assume that these will sign the death warrant of the book as we know it. Just as television failed to kill the radio and VCR players did not shut down the cinemas; for the foreseeable future at least there will remain some demand for this form of reading. McCrum’s call for a ‘dual format’ incorporating both technologies seems to be the most sensible conclusion. And even if ebooks come to dominate, they will not signal the death of reading. Rather, they will simply add another, enriching layer to the human drive to communicate. It is a process we have been enhancing for millennia.

Toby Lichtig is an editor at the Times Literary Supplement

E-read all about it, Robert McCrum, Observer, 25 January 2006