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I have been known to buy e-versions of my books because I was in a hotel room and I needed one right away to look up something in it; very handy for that - you can have it just the next minute; you can press the button and just have it.

I know I'm old-fashioned, but there's just something about the act of looking at books versus taking in information on a screen, which is so one-dimensional. There's a sense of ownership that you have with books, a physical connection.

E-books present the greatest opportunity readers have ever had to find each other. It's a chance for stories written for paper to find new life and a chance for new stories to appear, freed from the constraints of paper publishing.

Even as the Internet has revived hope of a universal library and Google seems to promise an answer to every query, books have remained a dark region in the universe of information. We want books to be as accessible and searchable as the Web. On the other hand, we still want them to be books.

Once the words of a book appear onscreen, they are no longer simply themselves; they have become a part of something else. They now occupy the same space, not only as every other digital text, but as every other medium, too.

When anything goes digital, let alone something as immaterial as a book, there is a tendency to see it as just in the air to be taken, and to lose the sense that somebody once made it.

After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.