Have you ever tried to bat an insect to death with an iPad2? Or prop up an uneven table with a Kindle Fire? It's expensive. And once you've done it you begin to realise that your tablet device is a little bit like Paul Rodgers in Queen. Its job was done much more effectively by its predecessor. In this case, the book.
That said, the tablet promises to cure the population's ailing reading habits. Sales of ebooks have overtaken sales of hardbacks. For those who have already forgotten, that's hardback books - real, physical books with pages, printed with ink and covered in dust jackets with outdated pictures of authors with slightly ridiculous expressions on their faces.
Only the humble paperback stands between the ebook and world domination. But in an age of increasing technological dependence, I'm backing the book until the very last page.
Don't get me wrong, tablets are seductive. They may even lure in green-gilled, young technophiles who would sooner recite love poems to an Intel processor than pick up a book. Which is good. But if we rely solely on downloads for our reading pleasure, we say goodbye to something more than words themselves can express.
It's hard to describe the joys of losing oneself for hours in the nooks of a labyrinthine bookshop while a whole city bustles about its business outside. Of rubbing shoulders with chin-stroking intellectuals in the philosophy aisle, while keeping one eye on the twitchy bloke in the stained anorak in the true crime section.
And books aren't just for reading. They're for carrying around college campuses to impress impressionable females. Having something by Albert Camus tucked under your arm makes you look interesting and erudite in ways a Motorola Xoom 32GB tablet can't.
That's not to say tablets and eReaders don't have their uses. Once upon a time, long-haul trips called for a team of Nepalese sherpas just to carry your bookmarks (the actual reading material had to be sent by container ship). Now you can travel with the entire works of Shakespeare, as you like it. Am I the only person who worries what would happen if an evil totalitarian dictatorship suddenly took over the world? Probably. But all they'd have to do is flick a few switches and your shiny tablet would become a mere placebo.
Real books can never be switched off whereas seditious phrases and insubordinate sentences can be easily edited from cyber books. The full version of the Oxford English Dictionary has already gone online, never to be physically printed again. On the internet, the meaning of words can be changed. Words can disappear altogether. And when you rob a culture of its language, you rob it of ideas and a means of expression.
Books need to stay as they are. They need to be bought alongside downloads so you can still read in the bath or on the beach; so you can press flowers between their pages as a child and find them again as an adult. They need to be smelled and held and felt along their embossed lettered covers. And occasionally, they need to be thrown at the heads of people too engrossed in their iPad2s to notice they live in a world still full of books.
And books bounce.
James Brennan writes about food, football and frolics in far-flung places for a range of mags, rags, papers and wesbites.
