The book is dead…

I’ll never read off an electronic tablet, I love the smell of the paper the rustle and turn of the page…

Originally books were held in people's heads. They were called stories. It was a grossly inefficient way to store things (people died and some of the stories died with them); it was impossible to reach a mass audience; and the bloody story changed at each telling so you could never listen to your favourite twice. Eventually somebody hit on the idea of putting marks on stone and clay and wax and animal skin and wood and to cries of ‘it’s not the same having to do this story thing for yourself with your eyes and finger’ and a whole industry was born – scribing.

After a while though people’s arms began to ache carrying around the heavy stone tablets, the clay crumbled to dust in pockets and would have clogged washing machines if there had been any to clog, the wax melted in the sun, the animal skins rotted and the wood got burnt on the fire one very cold winter. Fortunately for the avid reader though, along came Mr Paper (Paper was the man who invented paper) a very, very, very long time ago.

Not everyone liked the new invention; they missed the smell of the wax, the feel of the stone, the way the wood kept them warm and cosy in the winter… but there was no turning back. Paper was here to stay for ever and ever after and amen.

And so it was for ages and ages until a spaceship crashed into the Earth and the Kindle (obviously the result of pilfered alien technology) came into being. Of course many declared that the Kindle (other reading devices are available including books) was the instrument of the devil and couldn’t compare to the feel of a good old fashioned book in your hands. They said that they missed the smell of the paper, the rustle of the page as it turned. But of course they had said the same kind of thing about papyrus, parchment and stretched animal gut. It was all sentimental nonsense and besides: the only way to get a generation of humans who could only entertain themselves with a hand-hand electronic device to read was by giving them an electronic book.

Paper didn’t save the letter, the photograph, the newspaper, the magazine, and eventually the reading book (as opposed to those beautiful books that are really art objects that people stroke and flick through but never read).

And so it came to pass that little by little the electronic book took over and paper books became a thing of the past. People still hung on to a few for old-times sake, making them into wine racks and table lamps and sometimes flicking a page or two to hear the comforting rustle and smell the bookish dust trapped inside the pages. But, to all intents and purposes the paper book was dead. Publishers everywhere attended the funeral and the tree elves rejoiced in their now completely safe and sound forests.

Soon electronic books could hold entire libraries on a single device and the voice-technology within them became so good that nobody bothered to read any more, they listened to the stories instead. They could even set their book to radomise the plot and give alternate endings so that the next time that they listened it was different.

People sat around the fire, as books burnt in the hearth, listening to the stories the electronic book told them and wondering how the story would finish this time - and they all lived happily ever after.