This morning I came across an article on the CBC on the theme of how despite the pervasiveness of e-readers, sales of printed books are booming, and how while older readers preferred e-readers the prime readership for printed books was the younger cohorts, both gen Z and millennials.

Slightly less than ten years ago there was an argument that we had reached peak e-reader, but that was probably a result of market saturation and the longevity of the original e-reader devices – for example I’m on only my second kindle (and my third e-reader – my first being the long discontinued Interead Cool-er).

Equally, as my experiments with the dogfood tablet show, a very cheap basic android tablet makes a competent e-reader, and with the increasing size of phone screens, it’s almost possible to have an enjoyable experience reading a book on the phone.

Paper books, especially second hand paper books are cheap, you don’t have the upfront cost of an ereader, you can give them to your friends, and lets face it, the better bookshops can be fun places to while away an hour or two just browsing.

Ereaders offer convenience – you get your book online from Stuff Central, it’s often cheaper than the sticker price of the paper edition, and the device is light and easy to carry round – ideal for a train journey or these boring times stuck in an airport waiting for a delayed connecting flight. In comparison books can be bulky to carry round, which given all the other stuff one has to carry about, giving ereaders a definite advantage when travelling.

And of course, if you are on an extended trip of  a week or three you can preload your ereader with reading material.

In the old days, before the millennium, car trips used always find you having to somehow fit in a box with a two or three paperbacks each.

Longer plane or train journeys would often see you dropping off a book at a second hand shop and trying to find something else to read – for example, in Chiang Mai there used to be an English language book exchange shop where you sold your book to the shop and could use the money, plus a few extra baht, to buy a replacement book to read – basically a circulating library of sorts.

And of course, public libraries have got funkier, lending e-books and other media as well as paper books.

So, where does this leave us?

E-readers and ebooks have not been the great disruptor they were hyped to be.

However, they have changed the landscape immeasurably – some booksellers have gone to the wall, and those that have survived have done so by being funkier and offering extra facilities and space to browse.

People now know that they can get a book easily online either as an electronic item or a paper one via the mail, meaning that bookshops have had to provide value add to survive.

Physical books have a sensuousness about them that e-books will never have. Personally I find curling up with a paper book and a cup of tea on a cold wet winter’s dey a more enjoyable experience than sitting with an e-book.

That’s not to say I don’t value my e-reader, I do, it most definitely has its role – and that I think is the key – the e-reader was not truly a disruptive change, but now, ten or twelve years on, we can say that it is now part of a new reading ecology where paper and electronic books both have a role, not to mention libraries and the big second hand online book sellers.

There’s no need to agonise about this, change happens and change has happened …